Book Recommendations

July 20, 2017

<<<The American poet John Ashbery, who turns 90 this month, is often figured as the epitome of cosmopolitan sophistication – as a refined but radical innovator whose open-ended lyrics and narrative-free long poems refract and dramatize the anxieties of postmodernity. Doyen of the avant-garde Ashbery may have become, and yet, as Karin Roffman demonstrates in this illuminating account of his early life, the originality of his poetic idiom owes as much to his provincial rural upbringing, and to the compound of guilt and nostalgia that was its legacy, as it does to his embrace of the experimental in New York and Paris.

Ashbery’s parents, Chester and Helen, ran a fruit farm about a mile south of Lake Ontario, where winters are long and snowy. Chet, as his father was known, could be ill tempered. “He used to wallop me a great deal,” Ashbery recalled in an interview, “so I felt always as though I were living on the edge of a live volcano.” I’ve often wondered if the evasiveness of Ashbery’s poetry, its habit of tiptoeing or sliding around a crisis in states ranging from mild apprehension to ominous foreboding, reflects the simmering domestic tensions of these early years.

Young Ashbery escaped whenever he could to the reassuring home of his maternal grandparents, Henry and Addie Lawrence, who were more interested in artistic and intellectual matters. Indeed, since there was no kindergarten in Sodus, the small town nearest to the Ashbery homestead, he spent much of the first seven years of his life living in Rochester with Addie and Henry, who was a professor of physics at the university. It was there he developed a taste for reading, poring over The Child’s Book of Poetry in his grandparents’ well-stocked library, as well as Things to Make and Things to Do, a volume affectionately parodied in his first great long poem, “The Skaters”.>>>

July 18, 2017

Zeina Hashem Beck’s second full-length collection, Louder than Hearts, begins with the lines: “I write in English the way I roam foreign cities—full of street light/ & betrayal, until I find a coffee shop that speaks Arabic.” The poems in Louder than Hearts range across Tripoli, Mosul, Syria, Beirut, London, Paris, and New York, illuminating what is simultaneously most foreign and familiar in those places: the fundamental human drive to connect with others through language and the complexities of doing so in a world divided by cultural, religious, linguistic, and political boundaries. Hashem Beck writes from a certainty in the consolations of the written word. For her, a poem is “a tree without roots/ a street with enormous wings”; each line here both defies uprooting and takes flight, suddenly and assuredly. As the title poem notes, the motions and avowals in Hashem Beck’s work are bound but not beholden to tradition: “The woman in me is thousands/ of years old, her voice louder/ than hearts and derbakkehs.” The ancient tattoo of drumbeat and bloodline cross corridors, balconies, playgrounds, land-mine fields, broken houses, wastelands, continents, oceans, and ideologies. Louder than Hearts bears witness to the scarred and to the disconsolate, to the war-ravaged and to the displaced, to the strange interior countries one must survey and commit to memory if one is to understand the reality of human suffering.

Above all else, Zeina Hashem Beck’s work attempts to translate her particular understanding of human suffering into a poetics of radical empathy. Her poem, “Body,” emblematizes the elegiac uplift and heartache at the center of this collection. The poem reads:

Body

For Hassan Rabeh, young dancer displaced from Syria, who killed himself by jumping from a seventh-floor balcony in Beirut,Wednesday, June 22, 2016

& perhaps you flew. I read the news, how you plunged from the seventh floor, a Beirut balcony, & I am filled with a sound of sirens, a need to be alone. This war this theater this city this. & I was at a Da Vinci exhibit at the museum this morning. & what a blessing, to say I was at a Da Vinci exhibit this morning. & he was a pacifist who designed killing machines, for money always comes from warlords. & he, who like no other knew of the divine proportions of the body, & he who preferred to trace limbs & ligaments & the glide of bat wings in the air, he who preferred the theater, & the projector, & the drum, & bridges, imagined the machine gun & the submarine, & the tank, sculpted a bullet with a more precise dance. & oh how the mind bends & how light & shadows fall. & you, young dancer, tell me, what do you know of the flight of birds, & of the difference between theatricality & war, dissection & witchcraft, dance & death? & were you searching for your Palestine in Damascus, for your Damascus in Beirut, & were you looking for Allah in the joint, the spine, the twirl? & that last scribble your body made in the air, was that you, & were you trying to write backwards, to lift instead? & did you? Tell me, are the mountains blue in the distance? & does poetry matter, & does dance? & is there a bridge where the displaced go after they’re gone?

Here, as always in the poetry of Zeina Hashem Beck the world pliés before us in all of its ruthless beauty and terror. Hashem Beck does more than merely commemorate the life and mourn the loss of Hassan Rabeh in this poem. She articulates the endless adhan of art. She proclaims our ummah as everywhere, on the round earth’s imagined corners, where a poem might begin to take shape, to be uttered, heard, and remembered.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

July 16, 2017

This week we're thrilled to welcome Richard Kutner as our guest author. Richard graduated from Yale University with a major in French Literature. His translations from French to English include After the Roundup: Escape and Survival in Hitler's France by Joseph Weismann (Indiana University Press, 2017). Now 85, Weissman is a survivor of the 1942 Vél' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris. His story inspired the French film, La Rafle. Richard has also translated the novel Fear of Paradise by Vincent Engel (Owl Canyon Press, 2015), three Greek myths, and three graphic novels. He was awarded a Hemingway Grant from the Book Department of the French Embassy for his translation of Cast Away on the Letter A by Fred (TOON Graphics 2013).

Richard also works in the other direction and has translated 31 songs for Disneyland Paris, an entertainment website, and four Ghanaian folktales from English to French.

Richard taught at the United Nations International School in New York City for 33 years. He and his wife, Lynn, live in Manhattan, a short subway ride from both their sons. This year he began to translate and summarize nineteenth-century French letters at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

July 04, 2017

A Palestinian Novel Unearths Dirty Secrets in the Arab World / by JOUMANA HADDAD / July 3, 2017

We are a people of dirty secrets hiding beneath a veil of fake morality.

That’s the first thought that came to mind when I read about the banning of the novel Crime in Ramallah by the Palestinian author Abbad Yahya, and about the death threats he has been receiving.

Published this year and the fourth book by Mr. Yahya, the novel narrates the everyday lives of three young men (Raouf, Nour and Wissam) in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The Palestinian Authority’s attorney general banned it in February because it contained indecent texts and terms that endangered morality and public decency. Some Palestinians have even threatened to burn bookstores selling the novel.

When I heard the news, I immediately went out and bought a copy. Because I live in Beirut, the freedom haven of the Arab Middle East, this proved easy.

That evening, I started reading Crime in Ramallah and did not stop until I finished it. It was refreshingly genuine. It did not shy away from exposing the ugliness, the desperateness, the corruption, the loss of purpose, the unavoidable wrong turns and the uncomfortable truths of life in Ramallah after the second intifada. The sexual fragments are quite graphic, which was surprising and exhilarating. An Arab author writing about a homosexual character (Nour) enjoying oral sex, to cite but one example, is not something we encounter often. But, as the response to the book has shown, there can be no homosexuals in a reality-obliterating Arab world, where real manhood is defined by a chauvinist heterosexuality. Continued here

July 01, 2017

DD: I’d like to start by quoting the last five lines from Jim Harrison’s poem, “Books,” published posthumously in Dead Man’s Float:

I must sell these books, some quite rare, or exchange them for good food and the wine I can no longer afford. I used to look at pages 33, 77, 153 for the secrets of the world and never find them but still continue trying.

Could you use these lines as a jumping off point for discussing the good work you do as a publicist at Copper Canyon Press?

KF: Ha! What a great line from Harrison to start our conversation. I am the Director of Publicity for Copper Canyon, which means that I work to get our authors and their books print and broadcast media coverage. Because Copper Canyon is a nonprofit, part of my job also involves working to increase the visibility of our donor campaigns and reader engagement programming.

EG: As Copper Canyon’s Associate Publicist, I manage the press’s digital footprint — primarily on social media. Social media serves to amplify press coverage for our books and authors, support the press’s development initiatives, and help build relationships with our community of readers and the literary community at large. The digital landscape is always changing and it’s my job to keep up, so there’s a lot of answer-seeking and not-finding and then continuing-to-try; that’s part of the fun.

DD: Jim Harrison’s Dead Man’s Float and C.D. Wright’s ShallCross are both amazing books, capstones to admirable lives in poetry and the arts. Do you see the marketing of these books differently than other books? Could you say that your work as a publicist in these cases is also to elegize and to praise?

KF: My role as a literary publicist is to advocate for poetry, and to shout from the rooftops when we get a beautiful collection in our hands. Both of these books are capstones, and that is an important quality that I took into consideration when we developed the publicity campaigns. They were handled with care, and both went out to reviewers with Letters from the Editor, contextualizing the work and honoring the legacies of the poets. The coverage they received was predominantly focused on the poetry itself, with remembrances and retrospectives woven in.

EG: Elegizing both Jim and C.D. felt in the wake of their passing more like an organic, communal act of which the press is only a part. Spending as much of my time plugged into online conversation as I do, it was incredible to witness the chorus of so many voices — writers, readers, academics, students, family, friends — sharing with the digital world the impact these poets had on their lives and their work. ShallCross and Dead Man’s Float naturally became important touchstones for this collective eulogizing. Ongoing eulogizing, really; I don’t know that the world will run out of things to say about either of these poets any time soon.

DD: What do poets most need to know about publicizing a book of poetry, in your opinion?

KF: I think poets should know that social media is a crucial part of how readers discover new books today. Online reviews, literary journals that publish their issues digitally, and presses that help celebrate its authors accomplishments through Twitter and Facebook, are all part of the publicity process. It’s also important to have an author website for readers to learn more about you. I think that a lot of poets don’t believe that mainstream media is engaged in poetry, and in some cases, it isn’t — but in many circumstances, reviewers and editors are taking note of poetry and looking for ways to celebrate it.

DD: How important is an author’s use of social media and overall web presence in publicizing a book?

EG: Generally speaking, I think the importance of a particular poet’s online presence is proportional to the importance of that presence to their readers. As a publicist, you want a book and its readers to find each other, so if a poet’s readers – actual and potential – are online, I think it makes a measurable impact if the poet is online too.

There are always exceptions, of course, and I wouldn’t push a poet to jump into the digital abyss if they’re not going to feel okay about being there. Managing a social media presence takes time and energy, and it’s publicly performative so it can drain your reservoir of self (hi, introverts!). A poet’s primary responsibility is to write poetry, so if Twitter takes away from that instead of feeds it, I respect the choice say “pass.” (That’s part of why I do the job I do: so poets can poem first.) But if social media fits comfortably into a poet’s life, their use of social media can really help make space for their book in the world and find the readers who’re going to love it.

DD: Since the last time Kelly was interviewed for this blog, by Nin Andrews, in 2012, Copper Canyon Press has launched several initiatives to raise funds and increase the variety of poets it publishes. One such initiative is the New Poets Project. Could you tell us a bit about this project and Javier Zamora’s new collection?

EG: The New Poets Project campaign used crowdfunding to raise funds for debut poetry collections by extraordinary voices like Zamora’s. Copper Canyon is a platform for both established and emerging poets, and for the latter, debut books can be the critical jumping-off point for long-ranging careers and can carry a lasting impact in the poetry world. We’re invested in the power of these debut books and the poets who write them – poets like Camille Rankine, and Ocean Vuong and Javier Zamora. It was great to see the literary community rally around these writers.

The emotional ground that Unaccompanied covers is remarkable. There’s a physical journey embedded in the book – an incredibly compelling one – but the internal landscape Zamora explores is equally rich and deeply considered. The sense of urgency in these poems sticks with me after I read them, too.

DD: Camille Rankine’s poetry seeks to propel the passive reader into active and aggressive questioning. With intense lyricism, Incorrect Merciful Impulsescharts the anxieties, the blindness, and the perplexities characteristic of urban life in contemporary America. Compassion foregrounds Rankine’s poetic inquiry into the confluence of identity, history, politics, mortality, and culture, in a nation endlessly implicated in violence, domestically and overseas. To me, this book is emblematic of the timely and timeless quality of Copper Canyon books. Which books recently published by Copper Canyon Press resonate most deeply with you in these dark political times?

KF: One could (and has) made the argument that all poetry is political. See: this, or this.

But as far as specific Copper Canyon titles that have resonated with me (in addition to Camille’s collection), these would make the shortlist (among many others):

DD: Kelly, your digital chapbook, Helix, is available online at Floating Wolf Quarterly. I enjoyed the lyric intensity of this collection. The first four lines of the title poem were particularly emblematic of the strengths of the chapbook as a whole:

That you may have been small, gene. A tiny cross of parental freeways. Little fragment of extended tastes: likes, dislikes, hair color, eyes. That our thrills could be found in the departure—

How has your work at Copper Canyon Press influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your work as a publicist?

KF: My work at Copper Canyon Press has changed my life. Hands-down: as a writer, reader, and a professional. I think I am probably a more sensitive marketing professional because I’m also a poet (actually I’m going through my own “first book” publishing process with Coffee House Press right now). So there are some insights I definitely try to apply to my job — about how vulnerable it can be to publish a book — for all poets regardless of their experience or publication history.

As far as how working at Copper Canyon as a publicist has influenced me as a poet: it has exposed me to so many different styles and types of poetry, and through that exposure I have experimented, imitated, reconsidered, and re-imagined, my own writing. I read many manuscripts throughout the year in order to prepare PR plans, sometimes multiple books a week, and often in raw form without final edits or revisions. This is a practice that has affected my vocabulary, my understanding of lineation, my theory on titling poems...the list could go on.

DD: Emily, I love your prose poem, “The Rabbit,” which appeared in the New Delta Review. It manages to be playful and new and to deeply engage Francis Ponge’s work at the same time. The poem ends wonderfully:

Rabbit, I think I am saying I would vote for you if only I had a better grasp of your platform.

Rabbit, I think, if you were my father, we’d go out to lunch every week and despite our labored conversation, I’d kiss your furry cheek before I hurried out of your car.

How has your work at Copper Canyon Press influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your work as a publicist?

EG: Thank you for such a kind reading of “The Rabbit!”

Surrounded by the work of incredible poets at Copper Canyon, I’m both inspired and daunted, moved to write and stunned into silence. Consuming good poetry is nourishing to me as poet: it feeds me rhythms I want to borrow and phrases I obsess over and forms I want to play in and new ways of being that I want to inhabit for a while. It wakes me up to the world again so I can write about it. But it also greases the machine of self-doubt; it feels like I’m always navigating this push and pull – a healthy tension, I like to think.

The flow of influence in the other direction is less fraught: my life as a writer serves as a welcome source of empathy for me as a publicist working with other writers. I can’t fully inhabit every poet’s experience, of course, but I can honor the vulnerability and bravery of what they’ve done to craft a book through the careful attention I give that book, and through the work I do that helps that book make its mark, because I’ve felt that vulnerability myself. I value my own experience as a point of reference in that sense.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as a publicist?

KF: It is really gratifying to see sold-out readings or lectures, rooms packed with people waiting to listen to poets read their work.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

KF: It needs more readers.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

EG: Can I cheat a bit in my response? The first and truest-feeling answer that came to my mind in response to this excellent question isn’t quite a poem but words from a poet: Audre Lorde’s well-known assertion that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I carry those words around with me and visit them often. They call me out, they move me forward, they teach me and inspire me and feed a fire under threat. These words name the world; they’re the lens I need to really see it. I want to keep that close.

KF: My poem would be W.S. Merwin’s “Variation on a Theme,” from his collection Moon Before Morning, and it will also appear in The Essential Merwin this Fall 2017. The line: “thank you whole body and hand and eye / thank you for sights and moments known.”

DD: Speaking of W.S. Merwin, I’d like to end with a poem from the remarkable Garden Time; “The Present” is maybe the most Blakean poem in a very satisfyingly Blakean collection:

The Present

As they were leaving the garden one of the angels bent down to them and whispered

I am to give you this as you are leaving the garden

I do not know what it is or what it is for what you will do with it

you will not be able to keep it but you will not be able

to keep anything yet they both reached at once

for the present and when their hands met

they laughed

Kelly Forsythe is the Director of Publicity for Copper Canyon Press. Prior to working with Copper Canyon, she was a consultant for the web team at the Poetry Foundation, and worked with the marketing department at Poets & Writers Magazine. She has given lectures on publishing and book publicity at NYU, The Academy of American Poets, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Manhattanville College. Her publicity endeavors at Copper Canyon include Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda. She is on the Board of Directors for the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference, and the author of Perennial, forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2018. In addition to her work with Copper Canyon, she edits Phantom, an online journal, and teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland. Photo: Janessa Jackson

Emily Grise serves as Associate Publicist for Copper Canyon Press and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Missouri - St. Louis. Previously, she served as an Assistant Editor for Natural Bridge and a reviews writer for DIALOGIST, and is currently Associate Poetry Editor for WomenArts Quarterly — a St. Louis-based art and literary journal which features work by womyn artists. She teaches creative writing for pre-teens with the St. Louis Writers Workshop. Photo: Tim Young

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

June 20, 2017

Karin Roffman, author of The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life, a book I warmly recommend, was asked to name the "ten best Ashbery poems," and she has made such a list, making it clear that she crafted it for its pedagogic value mainly: these are the ten poems that she believes would best suit a newcomer to his work. Publishers Weekly published Roffman's list and provided links to the specific poems. The task Karin undertook fascinates me. It is not only impossible but also very difficult, as I have reason to know from the experience of editing The OxfordBook of American Poetry (2006) in which I represented Ashbery with fourteen poems, arranged chronologically. Here is how Roffman handled that scary "best" request. Three of Roffman's annotated picks follow below. For her comments on the remaining seven -- "But What is the Reader to Make of This? (1984), ""Syringa" (1977), "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975), "The New Spirit" (1970), "Breezeway" (2015), and "Some Trees" (1955) -- click here. Two poems on Karin's list are in The Oxford Book ("Soonest Mended," "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror")and three others ("Wakefulness," "They Knew What They Wanted," and "Breezeway") appeared in the 1998, 2009, and 2014 editions of The Best American Poetry -- DL

<<<John Ashbery, who turns 90 next month, published Commotion of the Birds, his 28th volume of poetry, last October. Choosing the 10 “best” volumes from this vast and remarkable oeuvre would be a challenge. Choosing the 10 “best” poems seems well-nigh impossible.

Recently, however, a student asked me: “Which John Ashbery poem would you read first?” Her question offered an approach to this assignment that I particularly liked. So I have decided to pick 10 Ashbery poems that I suggest reading early and often.

I have not ordered the poems chronologically; instead, I’ve arranged them loosely following the arc of a day. In writing the biography of Ashbery’s early life, I constantly returned to these poems for they remind me of how the poet is drawn to familiar moments when we sleep, dream, eat, think, feel bored, see movies, fear death, and fall in love. Taken together, these 10 poems create the experience of a life—from the mundane to the profound—a reading path that I hope will send you back to his poems for more.

This poem begins at the end of a dream, in that moment when one is awake but still partially in the dream. As a young poet, Ashbery found this sensation conducive to writing and kept paper and a pen by his bed. (He wrote “The Painter” in this state.) As the speaker awakens, “[L]ittle by little the idea of the true way returned to me.” The statement sounds like a restoration of consciousness, but, in fact, the speaker is tunneling deeper into his dream-like mood because its sense of unreality sharpens his perception. In this altered state, he has a vision: “A gavotte of dust-motes / came to replace my seeing.” These musical, dancing dust specks are beautiful, and we can suddenly imagine this indoor sight to be as sublimely lovely and inspiring as Wordsworth’s golden daffodils.

Ashbery grew up in upstate New York near Lake Ontario, in an area full of dramatic shifts in weather and a lot of snow, which he observed closely in a diary he kept for four years in high school. I choose this poem less for its climate references than for its clear expression of an idea Ashbery first conveyed quite simply in these daily diary entries, the notion that the ordinary and the extraordinary exist side-by-side in our mind. “Adam Snow” shifts between these states of thinking, and it also demonstrates how we constantly move between them without even noticing: “That you may be running through thistles one moment / And across a sheet of thin ice the next and not be aware / of any difference, only that you have been granted an extension.”

The poem is a cento, a form made up entirely of quotations. This one consists exclusively of movie titles that begin with “They,” a list both absurd and surprisingly coherent. Ashbery wrote the poem a decade ago during a period when he was indulging in Turner Classic Movies and busy making collages, something he had started doing for fun in college. These whimsical pieces look like visual poems; this cento is also a kind of poetic collage with so many different movie references stuck together. A movie buff from an early age (“The Lonedale Operator” recounts his very first movie-going experience as a kindergartner), Ashbery’s delight in film titles, character names, witty dialogue and even minor plot points has infiltrated his poetry since he was eight.

June 19, 2017

Lauren Marie Schmidt’s newest collection of poetry, Filthy Labors, roars with boundless defiant empathy on every page. For Schmidt, poetry is earned communion, restorative utterance, the expression of a belief in a secular, music-bound, Eucharistic reality underwriting daily life, an affirmation of the fact that our mutual individual brokenness, made manifest in the word, is what constitutes true communion. The poems in Filthy Labors draw their inspiration from Schmidt’s work as a poetry instructor at The Haven House for Homeless Women and Children; Schmidt also draws on her personal family history, exploring the difficult affections and the dense connective tissues that bind generations together, and often tear us apart inside. Schmidt arranges the poems in Filthy Labors around six of the seven Catholic sacraments: Baptism, Penance, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Holy Orders; she leaves out Marriage, an omission that felicitously underscores the collection’s commitment to gender equity and female agency in the face of a rabidly misogynistic culture. Each poem in this collection works as an outward sign of an inward grace (the grace is love, emblazoned with the hard-fought duende of Schmidt’s tremendous heart). Filthy Labors posits a sacramental view of the world, unmoored from the false trappings and mystifications of organized religion. Schmidt’s only prophet and priest is Whitman, with his call and response: “Why should I wish to see God better than this day?/ I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,/ In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass.”

Filthy Labors sees clearly the face of a young father running for miles after his daughter’s errant kite, the neck of a homeless mother with “Justice” tattooed on it, the face of a man changing his elderly father’s soiled underwear, a woman named Milagros breathing Spanish in her daughter’s ear, the faces of mothers blooming on the eternal verge of struggle, pain, fear, defiance, rebirth. Schmidt evokes the wounds and truths of the many worlds she has passed through. She deftly moves between forms and registers, exploring the limits of the ghazal and the pantoum, unafraid to shift from the vernacular to the vatic. Schmidt also bravely explores her own privilege and blindness, as she poignantly does in “The English Teacher Gets a Lesson in Inference,”

You got any kids? Dionna asks. No, I say, I don’t have any kids.

You ever been pregnant? I don’t have any kids, so…

That ain’t the question that I asked you, she says.

Then she folds her arms across her chest and waits for me to answer.

Schmidt’s poetry, here and everywhere else in this collection, calls us into radical sympathy with others, grounded in the conviction that poetry might shine and quench and slip its tongue between our lips and pray. Filthy Labors is the product of far more than mere astute observation fused to talent and training. Lauren Marie Schmidt’s work never wavers in its commitment to the connections that occur off the page, in the air around a dinner table, in the common room of The Haven House, in all havens and the unsafe spaces between.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

June 14, 2017

Poems in the Manner of… David Lehman’s most recent book speaks to the future by speaking to the poets who have come before. Featuring poems inspired by Kafka, Lady Murasaki, Catullus, alongside translations and astrological profiles, it’s a book that opens up with enthusiasm, deep love for poets’ technique and for their individual personalities, and provides possibilities for teaching. When I met David, he placed his hat on his hat stand and sang me the lyrics of my favorite Gershwin song. I talked to him about Poems in the Manner of… (Scribner), collaboration, and the American songbook.

Lauren Hilger: Most of the titles in this book begin “Poem in the manner of” and all start with a preface. I especially admire the poems that twist this constraint, like the twice-baked idea of a poem in the manner of Wallace Stevens as Rewritten by Gertrude Stein. I am curious, though, about how many layers it would take for it to no longer be a poem “in the manner of” and for it to just be your own. If this is a poem in the manner of Stevens rewritten through Stein, for instance, how many other voices would need to appear before it was yours again?

May 25, 2017

I read Diane Cameron's story about her stepfather last summer and have been thinking about it ever since. Donald Watkins, a former Marine, returned in 1939 from military service in China and in 1953 murdered his first wife and his mother-in-law. He was sentenced to Fairview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he remained for twenty-two years. From the foreword by William P. Nash, MD, Director of Psychological Health, United States Marine Corps:

Whether engaged in warfare, peacekeeping, or humanitarian assistance, the greatest challenges warriors face are moral rather than physical. For deployed warriors, physical dangers come and go, but moral dangers are everywhere, all the time. In the high-stakes world of the warrior, there is usually one, or perhaps just a few, right things to do in each situation. And both the cost and consequences of those right actions can be enormous. For a Marine on guard duty, the right thing is to find every threat to those being guarded and to let none pass. For a Navy corpsman tending the wounds of Marines on a battlefield, the right thing is to save every life and limb. For a China Marine in Shanghai in 1937, the right thing was to do nothing--to merely watch as thousands were raped and killed. That's not a tough job; it's an impossible job. We now know that one of the consequences of failing to live up to one's own moral expectation can be moral injury, a deep and lasting wound to one's personal identity.

At a deeper level, perhaps the warrior's challenge is more than just choosing right actions over wrong. Perhaps the most fundamental role warriors play in our society is to venture into the unclaimed territory between good and evil, to construct goodness right there on evil's doorstep, and then to defend it with their lives. To serve selflessly while others exploit, to show compassion while others are cruel, to forgive the unforgiveable--these are all ways to create goodness in the face of evil. So also is making sense of a brutal double murder that happened to decades ago in order to find and celebrate the humanity of a veteran China Marine.

Diane Cameron took a deep dive into her stepfather's life. She spent many months--years, really--digging for any bit of material that she could use to understand the particulars of his experience and to grasp how the trauma of war shaped his life. She put the pieces together with the attention and skill of an archaeologist assembling the bones of a dinosaur. Her book is a page-turner, as gripping as a suspenseful mystery novel. She moves back and forth through time as she charts her own development alongside Watkins'. As the child of someone fought with the US Army during WWII and who died before I had a chance to ask him about his service, Diane's book brings me closer to my father.

One of the more memorable passages is the following, in which Diane writes about her work as a community educator:

When I worked in community education programs, one of my jobs was to help family and community members better understand the experience of mental illness. We'd begin each session with an opening exercise that was intended to simulate the experience of schizophrenia. It begins by asking participants to work on a simple task like a jigsaw puzzle or easy crossword. While they are doing the task, the leader turns on several different radios placed around the room--each one tuned to a different station. There is a confusion of sounds and music. One of the leaders also changes the lighting, randomly turning lights on and off so that the room is alternately dimmed and brightened. While all of this is going on, the participants have to continue their task. And as they begin to struggle to pay attention, the leader moves through the group and whispers to participants one at a time,"You look like shit," "No one cares what you think," or "These people hate you." This experience is, after a few minutes, unnerving at best, and yet it is only a fair approximation of what persistent, unscreened stimuli are like for a person with schizophrenia.

On this Memorial Day weekend, while you are thinking about those who serve, buy this book. You can do so here. Find out more about Diane Cameron here.

May 15, 2017

Susan Lewis’s new collection of prose poems engages the complex routines and the constantly shifting contours of daily life in the twenty-first century with great humor, terror, anger, and insight. Like Kafka, like Borges, Lewis explores the uncertainties that underwrite a life, and that linger in the margins of the page; from such uncertainties, and from the chaos embroidered into the antimacassars of the quotidian, Lewis’s prose poems present themselves as an endless gallery of rooms wherein one might dwell on the raging absurdities and the gentle profundities of existence. In these poems, Lewis introduces a man overwhelmed by the complexity of most things, refugees from the native urban clatter, a god of guilt trying to sharpen the curvatures of space-time, a girl who knows her waking life is an illusion, figures sidling into their lives like shy crabs, motivations stunted, discourses un-tongued, the logic of the stutter-step and the sucker punch, the language of bureaucracy colliding with medusa-headed vernaculars and scientific lexicons. Lewis’s ultimate subject, however, is the protean, indeterminate, baffling conundrum of the self, the mystery and multiplicity of our own individual discrete interior worlds.

For Susan Lewis, the prose poem provides a frame within which passionate inwardness and exteriority might overlap, exchange places, negate each other, and continue their distinct pinprick shinings. These poems take form in the interstices of desire, “caught between reciprocity & the cutting edge,” providing glimpses of a “braided interior, veiled though it remained by a haze of evasion.” At their best, the poems startle and skitter, nimbly shifting stances between sentences, darting between parable and parabola—acidic, exquisite, and surreal in the way that only the waking world can be surreal. The poem, “A Variable Equation,” is characteristic in its method; the poem reads, in full:

"This one had a weeping cat. In fact, he was a cat himself, when the notion struck him. He could leap from pool to pool like raindrops. When the pair of them cried, the earth beneath them shuddered, from pleasure or impatience. One day the cat’s tears dried up. It lay still becoming something else. Its man never found out who had ordered the new body, but he knew then & there he must get one like it. You could say he lorded it over his pet, but it was the cat become moonbeam which nurtured him before he had a self to speak of."

Like a cat become moonbeam it is impermanence that nurtures these poems and moves them rapidly outward. Heisenberg’s Salon offers poems that are by turns cosmopolitan and sage, wry and idiosyncratic, eccentric and expertly executed. Each poem here creates a home for another—newer, stranger, older, atomized—way of life. Susan Lewis exposes the flux within the habitual, the unruliness of the very molecules within the customary; these outlandish internal geometries vanish and reappear as the ever-shifting furniture of the self.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

May 05, 2017

DR: Before Lithic I was a geologist, an astronomer, and a teacher of earth and space science. Lithic means, pertaining to stone. Long before I became a geologist, my Dad was the poet of the family, so the possibility of poetry has always been about. I wrote a poem in second grade that gave me a good feeling. I wrote a poem in 1992, another in 1994, then they started coming more frequently. About 12 or 15 years ago, I became close with Jack Mueller, a lifelong constant poet-maker with deep knowledge and strong presence. He is a prolific trickster. As Hank Stamper might say, he'll “never give a inch.” Jack was a fixture in San Francisco in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, with Ginsberg, Corso, Doyle, Hirschman, Cherkovski, and the ongoing gang. He is a mountain (in the house at the top of the hill at the end of the road.) Thousands of 3X5 cards and bar napkins with rapidly sketched cartoons, sharpened by fast comment, piled on the dining room table. They captivated me. “Let's make a book of these napkins!” That became, Whacking the Punch Line, and that was the beginning of the Lith.

Lithic Press started taking off about two years ago when I hired Kyle Harvey to do design and layout work. Kyle is a beautiful human: multi-talented, motivated, poet-musician-artist, and a brilliant designer! It is amazing to work with him! Lithic would not be what it is without him.

DD: Tell us about your catalog. What do Lithic poets share in common?

DR: Our catalog has about 30 titles from 20 writers. A little more than half are chappies, the others, perfect-bound longer collections. With the idea of creating rare books, we've done a couple of cloth-bound, numbered, Limited Editions (Jack Mueller's, The Gate, and Kierstin Bridger's, Demimonde.) There is one anthology, Going Down Grand, Poems from the Canyon, that includes poems from more than 50 writers, and a couple of cartoon books, collections of Jack’s, compression sketches, along with, Whacking..., there is, Who Said Hawaii? I can imagine publishing books on Natural History or really anything that becomes obvious to make.

As far as I know, all Lithic writers put their pants on one leg at a time. I’m attracted to writers who pay attention to language in addition to any feelings, destinations, or particular sympathies. In all our books, I find some essence of existence, some insight, some play that makes the journey more stimulating.

An overriding thought that Mueller has ground into me and his many minions is, Obey Emerging Form, which comes to him directly from his acquaintance with Robert Duncan, and the importance he gave Olson’s thoughts on projective verse. The idea has grown in me, transcends my writing, leads me to drill, bolt and hang rocks from ceilings and trees... led me to open a bookstore. I look for manuscripts that obey emerging form.

DD: Can you talk about the importance of your bookstore?

DR: Books take my breath away, always have. I still see myself in the library as a kid, looking up at all the shelves. As I struggled to write a report, the night before it was due, I couldn’t fathom how all those books could have been written: so many words, sentences, paragraphs, page after page. It was magic. Still is. I’ve always loved to be among books, each one a little universe. Or a multiverse. Or just one good verse. I have Montaigne pinned on the wall,

“...I never travel without books in peace or in war. Yet many days or months go by without my using them. Meanwhile, time runs by and is gone ... you cannot imagine how much ease and comfort I draw from the thought that they are beside me...”

The bookstore has exposed rafters from which I hang rocks, pine poles, beaver-chewed willow sticks, globes of planets, asteroids, books, and who knows what’s next! Trilobites crawl across the counter. There are spinning chunks of basalt and rocks that hang up from the floor. The bookstore is a classroom, a field trip destination for school groups, a community center, a meeting place, an art gallery. We have frequent poetry readings, scientific talks, and music shows. It’s a thinker’s hangout. I ran a planetarium for many years, the bookstore is an extension of that.

Located in a small town on the western side of a western state, on the 2nd floor of The Old Bank Building, a block off the main drag, in a country whose president doesn’t read too much, business is best during our events. I’m optimistic, our name is spreading, drop-in traffic is increasing.

DD: Could you tell us about some of the titles forthcoming in 2017 from Lithic Press?

DR: We had an open reading last year for chapbook submissions, and three chappies are soon to come out from Karl Plank, Trish Hopkinson, and Kevin Carey. Four or five other chappies will come out this year. In addition to Adam's Stray, we’ll have four additional longer length poetry collections, including, Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, by Eugene, Oregon poet, Sam Roxas-Chua. In a break from tradition we’ll be publishing a chapbook of non-fiction by John Fayhee called, Driving Around the West with Drugs. We are also going to re-issue Jack Mueller's, Whacking the Punch Line, as a coloring book for grown-ups. All the titles are in the catalog on our website, here.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

DR: The first full-length collection I did with Lithic was Jack Mueller's, Amor Fati, which started with paper-clipped and stapled, crumpled piles of papers and manuscripts stacked on the milieu of Jack’s dining room table. Molding that into a book, in the thunder and wonder of Jack’s arguments with himself, was hugely invigorating. It took four years. I sent it to The Boss. Three years later it looks well worn on his desk. A major theme in Springsteen’s recent autobiography is indeed, amor fati.

DD: How has your work as an editor and book publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

DR: Before Lithic Press began to grow, there was about ten years during which I had a lot of very quiet time. I ran an observatory in southern Africa. I worked at night. The days were free, there were giraffes out the window, I tracked zebra and rhino, spent days on the hillside with the baboons, hyenas were about at night. The sky, the land, my friends... were all new. Time moved slow. My home in Colorado is a sanctuary. There is an observatory, beaver ponds, birds of prey, coyotes at night. I live with dogs. I’ve been blessed with enough nothing to get something done. Since I opened the bookstore, poems come less frequently than before (but I did get published! My, Primate Poems, came out late last year.)

I love facilitating the making of books. But as a publisher, I’ve had a glimpse of something of a mania among writers, and anyone who has ever written anything, to ‘have a book.’ Maybe it’s related to celebrity culture and the urge toward ‘fame.’ It can be ugly. I want to work with writers who write because they can’t help but to write. Books, for them, obviously need to be made. While writing remains important to me, I take my poems as they come and don’t worry too much at the time that passes in between. I don’t force it. As so many have said, I am a poet - when I am writing a poem. Otherwise, I am just another chump looking at the stars, paying taxes, dusting the shelves... I am attracted to writers who have vibrant connections with the world - beyond writing.

DD: Could you introduce Adam’s work and discuss the strengths of Stray?

DR: “Solitude's Best Apprentice” is the title of first poem in this collection. It details the mastery Adam’s father displayed with woodworking tools, making something from ‘nothing.’ Adam’s work is like his father’s hand on the chisel. Every poem is finely wrought with attention to detail, knowledge built from long apprenticeship, and a helpless desire for the work.

These poems are written from the inside out, like a Kesey novel, and like in a Kesey novel, I am drawn to what I do not know. I might get the names over time, stumble on dark paths, take sure steps with sharpened knives, severed ties, lies, and all kinds of unsaid. His longer poems are explorations from some honed place to wherever. He wanders. He remains open to ‘begging home a stray’ - up in Ralls - where I’ve never been but it feels familiar. Adam’s book looks to the north and walks off. He is a husband. His short poems are a fist. He has a glacial scar carved on his whorl.

In the Lith, above my head, The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead hangs from the ceiling on 24 gauge silver wire. The 1954 cloth-bound edition had been gnawed off the shelf and partially buried next to the compost pit by my book-loving bitch, Luckie. It hangs just above the bar table. I have to sit up straight to read from it (who sits up straight these days?) Randomly I find,

“...It often seems to me that European man was at his best between 1400 and 1600. Since then our appreciation of beauty has become too overlaid with intellectualization. We educated people have our aesthetic sense too highly cultivated and do not come to beauty simply enough...”

DD: The sonnet, the near sonnet, and a kind of nonce sonnet punctuate Stray. In a way, this is the phantom form underwriting the collection. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with this form?

AH: I really like the verb “punctuate” here. I think of received forms as a way to address tradition, to offer a small aside to the arc of where we’ve been and where we might be going. For me, the sonnet makes sense. It’s elastic, it’s flexible, and it can stretch gracefully and with resonance. It’s a way for me to organize my thoughts. Thematically, there’s a lot of, well, straying, physically, spiritually, emotionally—we stray from obligations, from duties, from love, from home, but I like that there are formal returns in the collection, which I hope echo in sound and sense from one poem to another. That underwriting you mention serves as a ghost refrain of sorts. Each poem is a crafted thing, but, once I started really considering how all the poems were in discussion with one another, I realized how a collection, too, is a crafted thing; it’s curated, tweaked, and shaped. I found a lot of comfort and joy and frustration and doubt in that process, and the sonnet and its looser relatives—the “Staring Down” couplets, too—offered touchstones for the shape the collection ultimately took.

I think of poems in general and received forms in particular as balancing authenticity and artifice. They’re crafted and structured to highlight the appearance of spontaneity, to feel necessary, and that they could not be otherwise. There’s a tautness in working toward authenticity and artifice, a fundamental tension, that I enjoy, and I find real satisfaction in reading poems that navigate and explore those concerns. So I tried to write the sort of poems I like reading.

DD: The pronounced influence of a Catholic upbringing shines through in many of the poems in this collection. Could you talk about the connections between Catholic culture, faith, and poetry?

AH: Being a cradle Catholic gives life a shape whether you want it or not, and, like the sonnet or poems in general, offers places to dwell, rooms for us to knock around in for a while before bustling back into the world. For me, being raised Catholic provided way stations for my days, big and small rituals that marked time passing and gave that time meaning and shape: the rosary, for one, but also the larger rituals, the events that celebrated transitions from one phase of life to another, Baptism, the Eucharist, Confirmation, Reconciliation. Those are stylized moves, rich in circumstance and filled with gesture and longing. The ritual expresses and evokes, enacts and points toward the hope for structures that transcend. Catholicism was the vehicle for these concerns, but that’s a circumstance of geography and history, a chance happening. It certainly could have been otherwise, but it wasn’t otherwise. I can’t undo that. Somewhere along the line, I realized that my Catholicism, no matter how lapsed still fires off in my synapses, it’s baked in and feels nearly genetic. In all my thoughts and feelings and approaches, the Church, in both positive and negative ways, has its say. And, for me, I find that poems have something of that structure that brought comfort and meaning and expression when I was growing up. I’m not glib about those tensions. Poems are rituals unto themselves. When poems are working well, they’re living chambers with intricacies and shapes—sonic, formal, rhetorical, metaphorical—, but they’re also expanses with possible selves and ambiguities shaped consciously and unconsciously, but shaped with intelligent hearts and empathetic minds. Those are the ones I want to write, and they’re the ones I want to read and reread and tape to people’s doors when they’re not looking.

I’m not a good Catholic in the way my grandmother would define it. I’ve not gone to Mass in a couple years, I’m ragged with doubts, and there is much that I find challenging. That said, the sense of wonder and awe in my gut, the realization that the world can be one place of majesty and terror, profound humaneness and abject cruelty, strikes me as a particularly spiritual issue. On the other hand, the Winter Daphne’s in bloom, and the Camellias are too. And there are swing sets and a broken down garbage truck and a fundamental collapse of political obligation to serve from below and to do so with sincerity and decency and intelligence. Those tilt-a-whirl scales have been slamming around for a long time, and we’re all of it. Poems, for me at least, can offer a shape to that. Poems, like religious belief, like ritual, can offer distillation and elevation and attention. They’re also “the things of this world” and I like to think of us all as Wilbur’s heaviest nuns working on our difficult balance.

DD: Who are the poets that have influenced you the most?

AH: I take something from almost everything I read. I love reading Frost’s North of Boston, flipping through Pound’s Pisan Cantos and seeing what sticks. I find Cummings’s Tulips & Chimneys, especially the five parts of “Chansons Innocentes,” influencing my thoughts quite a bit. I read a lot of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. I return to Harmonium, too. Plath’s bee poems, Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, those are important to me, too. CK Williams, the early stuff especially, and Philip Levine, the gritty gentleness I found there stuck with me. I read Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires and Refusing Heaven probably more times than I should have.

DD: What contemporary poets do you most admire?

AH: First, I’d be faithless and unkind if I didn’t say how much I admire the poet-mentors at NMU and TTU who worked with me. You hear stories about negligent faculty, and maybe you see some of it, too, but that was not my experience when it came to talking poems, getting feedback on my work, getting suggestions for places to submit, and the like. And the fellow students I worked with at both places were supportive, motivating, and talented. In those ways, I’ve been very fortunate.

I also admire, in no particular order, Frannie Lindsay, David Bottoms, Robert Morgan, Sarah Lindsay, Connie Wanek, Martha Serpas, Peter Everwine, Lance Larsen, and Christian Wiman. I heard Ross Gay read “Nursery” a while back, and it’s never left my ear. I like Steve Scafidi’s work, too. Yusef Komunyakaa’s Talking Dirty to the Gods was a revelation as was Heather McHugh’s Upgraded to Serious. Karen Skolfield’s Frost in the Low Areas, the title poem especially, is excellent. I also enjoy Alberto Ríos’s work. Edward Hirsch’s Special Orders comes to mind, as does Thomas Lynch’s Walking Papers. I also admire Terrence Hayes. He was in a small town one over last year, and his talk meant a lot to me.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

AH: There’s a ton of room to write in terms of form and content. I find good poems all over the place, and I don’t know if they’ll be historically good, but that’s not the point. They’re good right now, and I like reading them. Maybe in five years I’ll cringe at those same poems I liked so much. But that’s taste and maturity and whatever else goes into our critical faculties. The poetry landscape seems to be okay with itself, and the mountains, deserts, swamps, cities, burgs, and towns are livable. Auden talked about reading work he knows isn’t very good but that he liked—it was his time, though, so what’s the problem? I read Verse Daily and Poetry Daily most mornings and subscribe to some lit mags, and I’m dazzled and moved and energized by the variety. I have critical assessment, of course, and I rank and sort and stop reading if I don’t like something, but I don’t get too severe about it. The stakes are high, they’re very high, but the importance of poems in my life won’t be made more meaningful by severity or exclusionary reactions. If I don’t like something, I stop reading. I might come back to it. I might not. I like wondering which poems being written now will last and be loved years and years from now. Cases can be made, I guess, but I can spend my time better by supporting the work I love. I think the variety we see is a sign of health, a realization of the importance of poetry in our lives.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

AH: Meaningful engagement with and support from our communities. I’d like to see more opportunities for poets in public schools or running workshops in rural communities and to have those events recognized as essential to the well-being of the community, not anomalous or cute. That’s close to me. I live in rural South Carolina and got to work with students on a Saturday workshop where we studied haiku, traditional and contemporary, discussing how image can work, how it expresses and evokes, how it suggests. That was a meaningful day; we had a lot of fun, but it was more than that. We slowed down. We read. We talked. We wrote. We wrangled with our responses, and, in doing so, we tried to make a shape for those responses. There are instrumental values there, skills that transfer to other aspects of our lives. But that’s a lucky by-product. It is inherently worthwhile to read carefully, to consider a poem on its own merits, and to respond in a community to your thoughts on the matter. It’s a way of thinking and feeling. And poetry adds real value to our lives. I have this little story in my mind of two state troopers sidled up to each other in their Interceptors in the median of a state road, driver’s side window to driver’s side window the way they do, exchanging well-read poetry collections.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

AH: Milton’s Paradise Lost. For a few reasons: I could win friends and gain influence by having marathon recitations. I could run for office, win, and recite it as a filibuster, providing explication as needed, sort of like Patton Oswalt’s Star Wars filibuster but way more serious. Lame joke aside: Paradise Lost is audacious and ambitious and so satisfying to read. Almost every line is worth our attention.

DD: I’d like to end with the poem “To the Bed Bug.” This poem surprised and delighted me. For me, it gently evokes John Donne’s flea. Could you introduce this poem?

DR: I asked my old climbing buddy, Smeds, if he felt bad squashing the skeeters. He said he didn't like the killing but when they marched on his territory it was war.

Reading Donne’s, “The Flea,” is to listen in on some impassioned reasoning from 400 years ago. Reading it gave me a headache (behind my right eye.) Oh, darling, just smoosh the damned thing already and take my heart. But what a glimpse into the ways of the days of way back when: those manners, the intricate speech patterns, all the fluffy frilleries, same goddamned insects.

Adam’s “little buddy” could be seen as playful pondering. What will they say 400 years hence when this Bed Bug is encountered? Perhaps it will sooth a headache and cause a yearning for this high time: it displays an openness to fun, such easy speech, such an indication of freedom to wander where thought will roam - with such nuanced insight, same hot blood.

TO THE BED BUG

Little buddy chugging innocuously enough beneath my cotton sock,

tag-a-long armed with anticoagulant and an endless gut,

welcome to me, a humble type-O host. My blood is your blood,

eh, ami? Or is it amie? Classy, aren’t I? Urbane and friendly,

worrying French gender that way. You’re worth it, best lesson in commensalism.

I get you. I’ve taken the orphan’s clingy ride with style, rendered myself

immune to all but need. I, like you, work to keep a bleeder gently bleeding.

Danny Rosen founded Lithic Press in 2008, and the Lithic Bookstore & Gallery in 2015. His book, Primate Poems, came out in 2016. The chappie, Ghosts of Giant Kudu, came out in 2013 from Kattywompus Press. Danny’s genetically based optimism is arises from his familiarity with deep time and big space. He worked in geology, astronomy, and for many years ran the Western Sky Planetarium, providing astronomy education for schools and communities throughout western Colorado.

Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Hayden’sFerryReview, and elsewhere. Claudia Emerson selected his work for Best New Poets 2010. Nominated for both a Pushcart and for Best of the Net, he was also a semi-finalist for the Boston Review/“Discovery” Prize and a finalist for the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry. He earned a PhD from Texas Tech and currently lives in Darlington, South Carolina with writer and editor Landon Houle.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

At first glance, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s new collection of poetry, What Blooms in Winter, has little in common with David Lehman’s recently published Poems in the Manner Of. Mazziotti Gillan’s collection maintains the thematic and aesthetic continuity that runs throughout her body of work; Mazziotti Gillan, here, as everywhere else in her work, earnestly relates the life story of a working class daughter of immigrants, growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, who made a place for herself in the poetry world. Lehman’s newest collection, on the other hand, catalogs the poet’s influences and enthusiasms, providing a series of nimble homages to the writers who have been fellow travelers on the road from An Alternative to Speech to The Best American Poetry 2017. While Lehman’s protean cosmopolitanism might jangle against Mazziotti Gillan’s homespun emotional éclat, both What Blooms in Winter and Poems in the Manner Of share the distinction of being finely wrought collections by poets whose contributions to the nation as teachers, organizers, anthologists, and supporters of the arts are inestimably great.

In many respects, David Lehman’s Poems in the Manner Of serves as a companion volume to his recently published The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry 1988-2014. If The State of the Art scans, with tremendous discernment, the bright stars and the penumbras of the contemporary American poetry scene, then Poems in the Manner Of directs a similarly acuminous gaze at the poet’s own personal canon. The poems in Poems are more than mere stylistic imitations of poets that Lehman admires; Poems in the Manner Of reads as the compendium of affections and predilections that have steered a life in poetry. In a sense that runs parallel to the lyric narrative chronicling of a lifetime unfolding in Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s work, Poems functions as a spiritual autobiography, a grand map of misreading, a pheasant disappearing in the brush, a search for the inexplicable, a renovation of experience, a purging of the world’s poverty and change and evil and death. Lehman frames the poems in this collection with prose that often further illuminates the intimate resonances carried in the lines. For example, Lehman prefaces “Goethe’s Nightsong” with the following remarks: “My father, who arrived in the United States as a refugee from Hiter’s Germany, used to recite this German poem by heart with an uncanny gleam in his eyes. It has often been translated but never, to my mind, satisfactorily.” The poem, a translation of “Wandrers Nachtlied,” reads:

Over the hills Comes the quiet. Across the treetops No breeze blows. Not a sound: even the small Birds in the woods are quiet. Just wait: soon you Will be quiet, too.

Lehman includes several other translations in Poems, of Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Mayakovsky, and (loosely, but most entertainingly) Max Jacobs. Each translation signals a deep encounter with the poem in question, a further implicit elaboration of Lehman’s aesthetic stance and tastes.

In addition to translations, Poems in the Manner Of includes among other forms, the cento, the prose poem, a Dylanesque rock ballad, a Jazz standard, and a poem in the shape of a multiple-choice test (on Freud). Throughout the collection, Lehman interrogates as he reverences—Lehman’s poetry, here, is a species of criticism—the work of Catullus, Li Po, Lady Murasaki, Shakespeare, Bashō, Christopher Smart, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Rimbaud, Cavafy, Yeats, Stein, Frost, Rilke, Stevens, Williams, Woolf, Kafka, Millay, Parker, Moore, García Lorca, Michaux, Hemingway, Borges, Neruda, Auden, Lowell, Brooks, Bukowski, Plath, Sontag, Koch, and O’Hara. A love of the silver screen (and the Great American Songbook) runs like a discrete tributary through the long list of writers Lehman honors in these poems. Also, running through these poems at every turn is Lehman’s own adventurous, gregarious, indefatigable life in poetry. This is a life that celebrates equally “the smell of Galouises and Gitanes sans filtre,” “the taste of white nectarines in upstate New York,” the prose of James Joyce, the lyrics of Johnny Mercer, the way that Manhattan felt in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s. David Lehman’s life as a poet, as a scholar, as an educator, has been one turned outward on the world, characterized by generosity and an overriding passion for the written word, by an unrelenting wonder and a simple desire to understand the complicated celestial mechanics of poetry. Poems in the Manner Of continues Lehman’s poetic project, gathering paradise, one grain of sand, one universe, one wildflower, at a time.

Like David Lehman, Maria Mazziotti Gillan has tirelessly promoted the work of countless poets and writers. As the director of The Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey, as the editor of the Paterson Literary Review, as the head of the Creative Writing department at Binghamton University, and, overall, as a champion of community outreach through poetry, Mazziotti Gillan has spent her life nurturing literary talent and encouraging young writers of all ages to find a home on the page. What Blooms in Winter continues the stylistic and thematic patterns that have been Mazziotti Gillan’s hallmark for the last four decades; Mazziotti Gillan’s is a poetry of endlessly expanding democratic vistas, grounded in, and forever returning to, the Riverside neighborhood of Paterson during the fifties and sixties. Taken as a whole, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry obsessively confronts her experience coming to terms with her hyphenated identity and her working class origins. As the poet Joe Weil has noted, Mazziotti Gillan’s poems aspire to the aria; and like the aria, each poem needs to be considered as part of an operatic whole. These poems are her biancheria, her embroidery work, homemade, artful, delicate, her dowry for future generation; as Gillan says, in the poem “The Lace Tablecloth and the Patterns of Memory”: “all the people I have loved are tucked away/ carefully in my mind, so that I can lift them out/ and remember and be comforted.” Not only does poetry comfort, for Gillan it restores. Each poem in Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work represents a Whitmanesque attempt to chronicle her own American journey as the daughter of Italian immigrants.

Although Mazziotti Gillan’s poems often alternate between contemplating love and loss, grief and joy, pride and shame, these emotional tropes merely provide the backdrop for her exploration of how the mind and the heart constitute themselves in any given act of recollection. In this sense, her poetic project runs parallel to the English Romantics, particularly Wordsworth. Also, like William Blake, Maria Mazziotti Gillan would agree that “a tear is an intellectual thing.” The intellect and the emotions overlap and intermingle in all of her poetry. What Blooms in Winter retraces the subject matter that Mazziotti Gillan has obsessively confronted throughout her body of work: the poverty of her early childhood, the experience of growing up as “a good Italian girl,” the concerns of motherhood, family, death, love, and the complicated miracle of remembering all that is no longer present. Like Mazziotti Gillan’s recent collections Ancestors’ Song and The Silence in an Empty House, What Blooms in Winter also contains many poems about travel, and topical poems about an earthquake in Nepal, terrorist attacks in France, and Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Most surprising in this collection, however, are the short lyric poems that haven’t featured prominently in Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry since her early books. “Dream Sequence,” for example, reads in full:

I imagine moving under green water as though I could breathe without an airtank.

I am a silver fish and imagine goldfish gliding past without noticing me,

and I, my body suddenly free of awkwardness, move with such grace, I could be

a young girl again, lithe and slender, as though I had been born to inhabit this world

like the sea creatures, my body shimmering in the watery dark.

This gorgeous, lithe, alacritous ten line poem stands in apt counterpoint to the torrential approach of the typical Mazziotti Gillan poem. Poetry, for Maria Mazziotti Gillan, offers a way to inhabit this world, despite the reality of pain, suffering, and death; gracefully, once again in What Blooms in Winter, this poet butterflies the dark.

Reading What Blooms in Winter and Poems in the Manner Of back to back during National Poetry Month 2017, I am reminded most forcefully of the virtues of a life in poetry. To paraphrase David Lehman, paraphrasing W.H. Auden, these books show that contemporary poetry not only survives, but thrives, in the valley of its saying. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and David Lehman are the kinds of poets all young poets should aspire to emulate; both poets have placed the care of others and the interests of poetry above their own work. Both poets have taken E.M. Forster’s epigraph to Howard’s End as the watchword for their careers: only connect. The impulse to celebrate and to understand underwrites the imperative to connect in the work of both Mazziotti Gillan and Lehman. The connectivity privileged by the lives and works of true poets such as these always and inevitably runs counter to the superficial forms of interconnection that bind the lives of so many contemporary Americans. Both Maria Mazziotti Gillan and David Lehman remind me that truth and beauty will never come either from social media and mainstream media or from the worlds of politics, business, and law; truth and beauty unfold face to face, and on the page, and both are infinite domains. Our work as lovers of poetry is to undo the damage of haste and dwell there—in the eye, in the ink—together.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

April 05, 2017

Elizabeth Lund, in her latest poetry round-up for the Washington Post, reviews the latest collections by David Lehman, Airea D. Matthews, and Robert Wrigley.

About David Lehman's collection, she writes,

<<< In 2002, David Lehman began an intriguing exercise: to write poems that both honored and mimicked the works of his favorite poets. Lehman’s choices were wide — ranging from Wordsworth, Whitman and Keats to Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Bukowski and Bob Dylan. His approximations also paid homage to cultural icons, including Marilyn Monroe and the Brooklyn Bridge. Together in one volume, Poems in the Manner Of(Scribner), these works read like an eclectic course in major poets and poetic movements. Lehman, who founded and is the series editor of Best American Poetry, introduces each “poem in the manner of” with notes about the subject’s style and approach, or about what he tried to achieve with his rendition. The strongest work captures the spirit of the original yet also stands on its own merits, as with “Poem in the manner of Basho: “Pond/ Frog/ Splash” or with the lovely translation of Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied,” which begins with quiet coming across the treetops and ends with “Just wait; soon you/ Will be quiet, too.” As the collection continues, readers see how modeling one’s writing after the masters can lead to fascinating discoveries and extend one’s own poetic range. >>>

March 31, 2017

DD: In an interview you did with Poets & Writers Magazine, you discuss working on William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New & Selected Poemsduring your first years at Graywolf Press. This was the first Graywolf Press book that I ever purchased and remains one of my favorites. In reading through interviews you’ve done over the years, it strikes me that much of your thoughts as an editor parallel many of Stafford’s insights as a poet. Could you begin by discussing what Stafford’s work has meant to you as a reader and an editor?

JS: Thank you, and I’m glad to think of our experiences of the Graywolf poetry list as running side by side and starting with Stafford. I grew up in the middle of Kansas, not far from Hutchinson, Kansas, where Stafford grew up. My high school English teacher, the terrific Carole Ferguson, noted my interest in poetry, and mentioned Stafford and gave me a copy of “Traveling through the Dark.” It was the first time, really, I considered poetry as an ongoing art, and a poet as a living person, and someone who suddenly seemed proximate, when all else were wheatfields and churches. So Stafford’s very being changed everything. I share with him, very much still, a sense of landscape and severe austerity, and a shame at what our country perpetrates against so many, including our own citizens, as well as ourselves.

DD: Stafford also wrote: “We may be surrounded by a system of talking and writing that falsifies event after event, decision after decision, relation after relation. Tangled in this system, we perpetuate it. Like porpoises in a drift net, the harder we try, the more we are entangled…When a writer works he is like someone who sets himself in a closed room and then invents new exits.” These words, published in the early 1990s, seem even more apt in 2017. In the spirit of these words and in this era of “alternative facts,” what is the place of poetry?

JS: I agree with Stafford’s statement, that we are entangled and complicit in our entanglement, as long as we emphasize, as he does, that it is worth trying to escape, even in the most futile of times, perhaps like these, where our language is under assault, if not our sanity. We can’t always free ourselves, but we can sometimes loosen the nets and snares that are tightening around others. I think poetry is a force for recognizing the positions of other people who may be like us or who may be little like us, but for the duration of a poem, and the echoing after, we speak in and with another person’s voice. That’s a truth, or at least it can put us in relation to a truth, for which there is no “alternative fact.” I think the poetry that we need right now shows us, sometimes unbearably, the failures of power and of language and of political leadership and the consequences of our collective action and inaction. I am thinking very much of works that many readers are turning to, such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, and Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS—works that position the reader in relation to confrontations of race, or examinations of the language of war, or the emptiness of false apology. The place of poetry is to show us the truth for what it is, and the lies for what they are. That isn’t new, per se, but neither are “alternative facts.” Kevin Young has an absolutely brilliant and ambitious nonfiction work coming this fall, titled Bunk, that has been many years in the making, and that so importantly demonstrates that American history has run parallel to the American hoax and to the American brand of racism, from Barnum to Trump. In publishing such books, and in many genres, Graywolf aims to combat fakery with literature of integrity.

JS: Many years ago, at Washington University, Carl Phillips implored me to read the poetry and critical works of Susan Stewart, and ever since, her clarity has been a touchstone and example of the lyric possibilities of both traditional and experimental poetry. Cinder is a perfect starting place for those who may not yet have been charmed by her particular ingenuity, and it’s a celebration of a remarkable ongoing career for those who have been reading her poetry and scholarship for years. I certainly admire the formal brilliance across these poems—the poem in the shape of an arrow, say, or the poem seemingly breaking down into an array of symbols and punctuation, or the poem that configures hell as a moving into and out of repeating lines, or the new poem in the form of gas-pump TV screens. But more than that, I admire the extraordinary sensibility behind these poems, one that is very concerned with the human capability for memory, individually and collectively, and concerned with our culture’s oppression of our human senses. I’m thinking, for example, of one of her masterpiece poems, “The Forest,” and the way the poem grapples with the question of how any of us will still be capable of experiencing a forest, in conception and in reality. So many of the poems, taken together, are reminders of art’s ability to record, encapsulate, and pass on our sensual experience. That’s an argument both of body and imagination, and of course, it’s an environmental and cultural argument, as well. Cinder opens with a terrific and generous group of new poems that alone is worth the book. I hope it’s an opportunity to celebrate a unique presence in contemporary poetry.

JS: All three of these poets offer very exciting first books this year, and they all point ahead to work that will matter for a long time.

WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier is a kaleidoscopic work, in large part a kind of searing rejoinder to the duplicity of government documentation, double talk, and pretend apology. The title sequence reconfigures the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, which was never spoken aloud, nor were tribes invited to receive the apology, and which was then buried as a text inside larger legislation. So was this even an apology? WHEREAS attempts to answer that question. It’s an important and innovative book, and one that has been a long time in its making.

Afterland by Mai Der Vang is a historic publication, the first major award-winner by a Hmong American poet, and we’re really proud to be publishing it at Graywolf as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Carolyn Forché selected the book for its really moving recounting of the Hmong exodus from Laos during the fallout of the Vietnam War, and the resilience and survival of the Hmong culture in exile here in the United States. The imagery of these poems is so unique—otherworldly and haunting in regard to “afterland” as the country refugees flee to and as the spirit world of the afterlife.

Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez is a bold combination of personal poems about growing up the daughter of undocumented Mexican parents and almost journalistic poems about sex workers, narco traffickers, and immigrant laborers. The subjects here are important ones, and Sánchez makes them feel vivid and very close, while also turning a discerning eye on the history of both sides of the border (and beyond), as well as on herself, sometimes with a deadpan and self-effacing wit. This is a really audacious book, and an important one.

It’s a hugely exciting time for poetry with so many amazing first books!

DD: In a recent book review written for the New York Times, David Orr writes of the first book:

"If you’re an author who specializes in, say, writing about science for general readers, then your first book will be regarded by most people as . . .the book you wrote first. That it was your inaugural effort will have no special significance; your work will be judged the way books are typically judged: as interesting or dull. But if your goal is to write about the imaginary lives of imaginary people or — particularly — to write poems, then your first book may be another matter entirely. Because now it’s not merely the book of yours that happened to have the earliest publication date. Now it is the start of your career."

Could you discuss your thoughts on the essential specialness of the debut collection in poetry? What have you learned about debut collections by reading and editing so many of them?

JS: Orr is right, I think, in that we seem to think of a poet’s development as something with a beginning, an arc, and an ending, and it’s often the work of scholars and critics to make a lot out of what it means for a poet to have a career. In fact, Craig Morgan Teicher is working on a book to be published by Graywolf about poetic development, titled We Begin in Gladness, which will look at various paths and directions—many of them not easy nor at all straightforward—as examples useful to readers and to poets getting started and wondering what a “career” even looks like. What does it mean for a poet to have a life in the art?

It’s true that a poet only gets one first book, and while more first books of poetry are published than ever before, many of them through first-book prizes and contests, there is the pressure for a first book to make a statement. I think poets feel a pressure, understandably, to come out with a book quickly and to have that book get attention, and that’s an impatience imposed by academic professional expectation if not by the ambitions of poets themselves, in many cases. It means publishers like Graywolf see a whole lot of first book manuscripts, and first-book contests like the Walt Whitman Award are flooded with thousands of submissions. It also means that way too many poets get overlooked at the stages of the first book, and perhaps even more so, the second book. That’s a reason why Graywolf feels it so important to collaborate on the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award, for a first book by an American poet over the age of forty, and partner on the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, for an African American poet’s first book, including most recently Donika Kelly’s amazing debut, Bestiary, which is one of the first books Orr is reviewing in the New York Times piece you quote from.

While I think every first book (or otherwise) is hopefully different and distinct, and so I hesitate to try to offer broad commentary about them, but in order to answer your question, I would say that many first books want to be acceptable, they want to win the contest, and they want to be liked. But fewer first books want to challenge, they want to risk, they want to unsettle, and they care less that they are liked and more that they are read and even resisted.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

JS: Every time a writer considers editorial suggestions and on certain things the writer pushes back, I feel encouraged that the writer is assured in their vision and ready to be published. It means perhaps seeming foolish or seeming just plain wrong or off base, but it also means I feel I have done my job in approaching the line that the writer has deliberated upon and decided is the defining line of what they sound like. That is the invisible work in the intimate space between writer and editor. It’s very encouraging to me as an editor.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

JS: The incredible groundswell of young poets right now, among them some individually brilliant talents, but more importantly, together creating a sense of collective greatness by way of national community defined by artistry and activism. That is encouraging as a development not just in contemporary poetry but in our world.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JS: American poetry needs serious, astute, challenging, and regular poetry critics and reviewers who are people of color, and who are women, and who are given an ongoing byline in the visible print and online publications that middle-aged or older white men are regularly holding and have been holding for a very long time. Solmaz Sharif very rightly mentioned recently that we need a great, new criticism to run alongside the great, new poetry of our time.

DD: If you could only read and remember one poem for the rest of your life, what poem would it be and why?

JS: You’re describing a world I don’t want to live in. We exist for multiplicity not just for singularity, and the single poem can only be great because it exists in a world with other poems in it. And if I knew I had found the one poem to be read and remembered for the rest of my life, and could name it for you, I think I could no longer do my job as an editor, nor could I continue to read poetry. Luckily, it seems, I haven’t found that poem yet, and I’m happy to be left in this fallen world where I am still searching for it among the many life-changing imperfect ones.

DD: What prose, music, and other art have most influenced you as a poetry reader and editor?

DD: Could you tell us a bit about some of the other Graywolf Press titles out later this year?

JS: In 2017 poetry, in addition to the titles mentioned above by Stewart, Long Soldier, Vang, and Sánchez, Graywolf is publishing:

Danez Smith’s big, bold second book, Don’t Call Us Dead, a really exciting and moving collection about race, police violence, illness, and the body in crisis;

Stephen Burt’s new collection, Advice from the Lights, which contains poems of memory and nostalgia, and also on gender identity, especially in the Stephanie poems throughout the book;

Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing is a sequence of prose poems in Bang’s unique signature language about the Bauhaus School in Germany, its artists and art (from which the title comes), and in particular the life of Lucia Moholy, who struggled so much of her life to be recognized for her photographs documenting the school, before the Nazis closed it in 1933;

Fred Marchant’s best book to date, titled Said Not Said, which is a book about moral and ethical questions, what gets spoken and what goes unspoken, and it includes a really wrenching sequence of poems about his sister’s long suffering from mental illness;

we are expanding and reissuing a truly essential book, The Half-Finished Heaven, by Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer, in Robert Bly’s seminal translations, which Graywolf first published in 2001, but we’re now glad to offer for the first time all of Bly’s known translations of Tranströmer’s luminous poems;

and we are publishing in November a really fascinating book, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, which will present original poems with multiple English translations, followed by a brief essay about the challenges of translating that work, all in a wide trim size to allow readers to see the poems and translations side by side by side.

Each year, Graywolf features online previews of all of our books in a given genre across the year, and for a better rundown on this year’s offerings, you can find the poetry preview here.

DD: I’d like to end the interview with my favorite poem from a Graywolf Press book, Christopher Gilbert’s “Listening to Monk’s Misterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair” from Turning into Dwelling. Could you introduce this poem (and this amazing book)?

JS: Every interview should end with this poem and with celebration of Christopher Gilbert. It’s a poem from Gilbert’s Walt Whitman Award winning book, Across the Mutual Landscape, which was selected by Michael S. Harper and published by Graywolf in 1984. It was Gilbert’s only published collection in his lifetime, but it has long been a kind of touchstone first book—in certain circles a cult classic—for its vision and music, as in this poem. Gilbert sees the syncopations and patterns of Thelonious Monk’s Mysterioso, which walks forward and backward in intervals, as akin to the patterns of braiding. But more than that, it’s the movement of offering and taking back, being called into a space that you might not normally be invited into, like braiding your sisters’ hair. There’s no music like Gilbert’s, part homage to jazz, sure, but the music of a mind making sense of itself and calling itself to be. Like music, it’s a poem whose language exists seemingly in and out of time, a participation with mutuality, and one that never arrives or tries to arrive at completion.

After Gilbert’s death in 2007, through Ed Pavlic and Terrance Hayes, we found that Gilbert had been working for a long time on a second collection, called Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation, which had been entrusted and edited by Fran Quinn and Mary Fell, and in 2015, we were able to publish Across the Mutual Landscape and Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation together in one book, titled Turning into Dwelling, with an introduction by Terrance Hayes. It’s landmark work, and it deserves as many readers as it can get, and it certainly deserves—thank you, Dante—the last word.

Listening to Monk’s Mysterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair

What it’s all about is being just beyond a man’s grasp, which is a kind of consciousness you can own, to get to be at a moment’s center and let it keep on happening knowing you don’t own it—

which is moving yourself close to, being particular to that place. Like my two sisters taking turns braiding each others’ hair— hair growing against their weaving, they formed a flow their hurt and grace could mean as each took turns pulling the comb through the other’s knots and their little Vaseline.

A knowing which makes the world a continuity. As in your core something calls to you at a distance which does not matter. As in the world you will see yourself listening to follow like water following its wave to shore.

To arrive in your life you must embrace this letting, letting which is a match for the stream through flowering field and the tall trees wandered into and the river wearing beads just ahead which you go into further on because you can.

This going so is something else—the way it flows into always something deeper and over your head, a kid with “why” questions. Your answer is a moment struggling to be more than itself, your straining for air to have the chance to breathe it free. It’s alive you’ve come to,

this coming into newness, this dis- continuous mind in you looking up, finding an otherness which trusts what you’ll become— for me, my sisters once offering, “You want to learn to braid my hair.” If we are blessed in this world it is in feeling this—

i.e., there are circumstances and you are asked to be their member. Not owning but owning in— a participation, like Monk’s implied words reaching for their sentence: “If you can get to it. . . .”

At a hefty 740 pages, the new anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance symbolically and actually enacts the oppositional imperatives embedded in its title. 50% of the proceeds from the volume are being donated to Planned Parenthood. The assembling of the anthology itself, spearheaded by Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson, represents a model for activism and mobility in a time of political emergency. Boughn and Johnson brought together eighteen other editors from diverse aesthetic and cultural backgrounds to solicit and to curate the work of more than 350 poets in roughly two months. As Boughn and Johnson note in their incisive introduction, “Poetry and Resistance,” the book “is not intended as an offering of unique, sophisticated “creative writing.” It is first and foremost, a collective, insurgent call that is part and parcel of a sovereign people’s challenge to a narcissistic oligarch and his lackeys, who smirk now from their temporary perches of power. Its pages are bound in direct, literal ways, to the historic worldwide marches of January 22nd—and they stand as evidence that the vast majority of American poets (and artists and writers of all kind) revile the new reactionary dispensation.” In addition to enumerating succinctly the premises underwriting Resist Much, Boughn and Johnson’s introduction trenchantly explores the limits and potentials of poetry as resistance. The anthology is worth purchasing for the introduction alone, which sounds a hopeful note for the many thousands of practicing writers in the United States today who will register dissent “in the embattled commons, and not just in journals, personal collections, or anthologies like this one.”

The anthology begins and ends with poems registering dissent beyond the narrow scope of the 45th President’s election and inauguration. Lorenzo Thomas’s poem, “Inauguration” initiates the anthology, by recalling the Reagan and Kennedy administrations, and by summoning the ghost of Robert Frost in order to evoke a counternarrative to the Manifest Destiny both lauded and complicated in Frost’s work. In “Inauguration,” Thomas rewrites the famous first line of Frost’s “The Gift Outright”; Frost’s “The land was ours before we were the land’s” becomes Thomas’s “The land was there before us / Was the land.” Thomas’s version radically re-envisions historical notions of ownership, privilege, and class, while halving, enjambing, and subverting Frostian blank verse on the syntactical level. By beginning the anthology with this revolutionary inversion of a poem Frost claimed as a commentary on the Revolutionary War, Boughn, Johnson, and company, inaugurate Resist Much as an anthology concerned with troubling superficial ways of seeing and articulating; Lorenzo Thomas’s poem moves its readers backward and forward in time, opening a dialogue between literary tradition and the mechanisms of empire. Likewise opening these dialogues, the anthology ends with Walt Whitman’s “Respondez!,” a poem of grim forebodings and astringent ironies, the bleak flipside of the democratic vistas Whitman celebrated throughout Leaves of Grass.

Reading “Respondez!” at the end of this anthology further affirms, as if any affirmation were needed, the towering stature of Whitman as poet of these United States. Whitman wrote “Respondez!,” at the same time as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” but ultimately left it out of later editions of Leaves of Grass, such as the 1891-92 version. Despite Whitman’s exclusion of the poem, it is perhaps the most comprehensive assessment contained within Resist Much of the failures in contemporary American politics and culture. As Boughn and Johnson remark in their introduction “Respondez!” was Whitman’s: “sharply ironic demand that U.S. America respond to the betrayal of its democratic promise, its abandonment of equality for oligarchy, of fraternity for institutionalized racism and sexism, of spiritual generosity for greed and money grubbing, and of liberation of Eros for a violent, Calvinist repression of human energies.” Whitman’s impassioned plea reads as ominously timely in an era of so-called “alternative facts” and “fake news.” Whitman writes:

Let murderers, thieves, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions! Let the old propositions be postponed! Let faces and theories be turn'd inside out! Let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results! Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery! Let none be pointed toward his destination! (Say! do you know your destination?) Let trillions of men and women be mock'd with bodies and mock'd with Souls!

Although murderers, thieves, bigots, and fools have always helmed the ship of state, perhaps at no time in American history have meanings been so freely criminal. Perhaps at no time has our destination been so unclear. Perhaps at no time have so many American men and women been mocked in body and mind, have felt so acutely the Dickinsonian “zero at the bone” when contemplating the fate of their nation and the face of their president. At no time in recent memory has the theory of America announced itself so stridently and so overtly as management, caste, and comparison.

The writing anthologized between Lorenzo Thomas’s “Inauguration” and Walt Whitman’s “Respondez!” opposes any theory of America grounded in racism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, and an ever-shifting panoply of disparate hates and fears. The poems in this volume are written in what Evie Shockley calls “the heartbreak edge of midnight.” These are songs sung by a fugal choir to the northernmost stars, the wayward child, the coercive lover, the dependent child, the reluctant mother, the unfaithful lover, the elusive mother, the waking nightmare, the “dear, dear we.” Resist Much includes work from as aesthetically different poets as Ron Silliman, Linh Dinh, Rodrigo Toscano, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Jason Schneiderman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Alicia Ostriker, Michelle Peñaloza, Craig Santos Perez, R.A. Villanueva, Fady Joudah, and Brenda Hillman, to name a few. The editors listed above also contribute poems. The contributions come from emerging and established poets of varied camps and approaches to poetry. The unity and inclusiveness practiced in this anthology offers a pointed critique of the fractious polarization overwhelming American political discourse. This inclusiveness offers a heartening example for other anthologists, editors, and publishers to overcome aesthetic orthodoxies and to embrace the kaleidoscopic possibilities of what constitutes a poem.

Eileen Myles and Denise Duhamel’s anthologized poems provide a good example of how two accomplished and wildly distinctive poets might address the same subject through widely different means. Myles poem, “Creep,” reads:

ugly nightmare eating too much dunking your head in water over and over again. Feel bad for your kid all of them but most of all us bad nights when I was young and drinking pred atory men with swollen heads would buy me drinks and want to fuck me again & again because I was nothing to them and he is our president now.

Myles deftly puts into conversation the misogyny displayed by “our president” with the predatory violence that contextualizes the everyday experiences of American women. Trauma and rage dovetail in this poem and counterclaim us. Denise Duhamel similarly explores the dovetailing of rage and trauma in American misogyny. Her poem, which cleverly parodies Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” begins with a quote dated October 9, 2016, from the then-candidate, casually dismissing comments that clearly celebrate objectifying and violating women: “It’s just words, folks. It is just words.” Duhamel begins her poem:

‘Twas nasty, and the slithy bimbos Did gyre and whine in the pageant: All piggy were the gold diggers, And the moms who breastfed in public.

“Beware the pussy, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware those plastic surgery tits, and shun Any frump who won’t put out!”

Carroll’s nonsense verse provides an apt point of departure for satirizing a politician whose entire worldview depends upon the simultaneous denial and attenuation of the power of language. Duhamel, like Myles, foregrounds her poem in the present, but uses the present to explore how misogyny works in a wider historical and social sense.

Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance offers a wide array of poems, addressing issues from misogyny to climate change, ranging from the collapse of the fourth estate to police violence, exploring the fascistic tributaries of American culture that have always been running beside us, but which have pooled themselves in the current administration. The poets anthologized here bear witness against injustice past, present, and future. In his excellent recent book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, historian Timothy Snyder urges: “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read Books.” Resist Much affords many examples of reinventing and repurposing language in order to confront tyranny and fascism. Editing this book was one act of resistance, buying this book is another, reading it a third. This anthology does not merely symbolize the widespread resistance to the current administration among poets and writers. Resist Much signifies the strength of a literate and politically conscious America, which will not be duped by the mountebank tactics and the empty rhetoric of politicians. As Whitman would affirm, it is up to writers, governments, and households alike, to brace themselves against “the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust.” Buy this book today, read it, and spread the word. Resist.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

March 04, 2017

In his essay, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” Lewis Hyde notes: “as a person becomes alcoholic he turns more and more into the drug and its demands. He is like a fossil leaf that mimics the living but is really stone.” Kaveh Akbar’s debut chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, initiates a reverse fossilization that catalogs the hungers, atomizes the absences, and amplifies the dailiness of 21st century American life. Akbar’s fierce unfettered intelligence roams from the sublunary to the interstellar. One moment, Akbar’s poems view the world from the perspective of sand watching silt dance in the Nile River. The next moment, Akbar’s poems look on, from the other side of the stars, past the astronaut dangling from the umbilicus of the space shuttle, to the earth itself “wilding around us” in “a severe sort of miraculousness.” Akbar knows the language of riptide and rogue comet; in these poems, “eternity looms / in the corner like a home invader saying don’t mind me I’m just here to watch you nap.” The self in Akbar’s poems is a shifting palimpsest of insatiable desires, mystic visions, exilic energies, and adhesive love. As Akbar puts it in “Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game”: “I have always been a tangle of tongue and pretty / want.”

Akbar’s “tangle of tongue and pretty want” is Whitmanesque in its scope, evoking the visionary tradition of English language poetry from Christopher Smart and Thomas Traherne through Gerard Manley Hopkins and Allen Ginsberg to present, and reformulating that tradition within the framework of an Islamic cultural background with its own distinct visionary poetic tradition, ranging from Rabia Basri and Fariduddin Attar, through Jalaluddin Rumi, to Mian Muhammad Baksh. In “An Apology,” for example, Akbar writes:

As a boy I tore out the one-hundred-and-nine pages about Hell in my first Qur’an. Bountiful bloomscattering Lord, I could feel you behind my eyes and under my tongue, shocking me nightly like an old battery.

The transgressive act of tearing pages from the Qur’an recalls Fariduddin Attar’s poem “I Have Broken My Vows,” in which the speaker enjoins: “Throw me out of the mosque, / As I went there drunk last night.” In fact, Akbar’s poetry ingeniously inverts the trope of drunkenness found in Islamic mystical poetry. In Portrait of the Alcoholic, sobriety, not inebriation, becomes a metaphor for the intoxicating nature of communion with the divine. The divine, in these poems, can be found equally in the ordinary housefly and in the dilated pupils of a beloved. In “Eager,” Akbar affirms: “I like the life/ I have now free as an unhinged jaw but still I visit my corpse.” Here, as everywhere else in his poetry, Kaveh Akbar chooses astonishment instead of despair, joy instead of mere survival, gratitude for the alchemical body, and its ancient hungers, become a mound of jewels. Portrait of the Alcoholic must surely presage a bountiful, radiant, bloomscattering body of work to come.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

March 03, 2017

Dogs read the world through their noses and write their history in urine. Urine is another and highly complex source of social information; it is a language, a code, by means of which they not only express their feelings and emotions but communicate with and appraise each other. Tulip is particularly instructive in this matter when she is in season, for on these occasions she has numerous callers who leave the marks of their attention round the front door. On her way in and out she reads, with her long black nose, these superimposed stains, and the care with which she studies them is so meticulous that she gives the impression of actually identifying her acquaintances and friends.

She has two kinds of urination, Necessity and Social. Different stances are usually, though not invariably, adopted for each. In necessity she squats squarely and abruptly, right down on her shins, her hind legs forming a kind of dam against the stream that gushes out from behind; her tail curves up like a scimitar; her expression is complacent. For social urination, which is mostly preceded by the act of smelling, she seldom squats, but balances herslef on one hind leg, the other being withdrawn or cocked up in the air. The reasons for this seems obvious; she is watering some special thing and wishes to avoid touching it. It may also be that in this attitude she can more accurately bestow her drops. Often they are merely drops, a single token drop will do, for the social flow is less copious. The expression on her face is business-like, as though she were signing a check.

Jes’ Grew, for those who don’t know, is the epidemic at the center of Ishmael Reed’s hilarious prophetic noir, Mumbo Jumbo. It’s hard to put your finger on Jes’ Grew because it doesn’t stay still long enough. It’s related to Emerson’s whim but it’s got more rhythm which I like to think Emerson would have enjoyed. If it’s dance – and it is dance – it’s also a freedom of mind that can look like dance. Or sound like it. It’s a “psychic epidemic.”

Things Jes’ Grew when all of a sudden you start moving and not only can’t you stop, you don’t want to stop. Inspiration is a sad Atonist imitation of Jes’ Grew. Jes’ Grew takes the top off. Jes’ Grew is a mortal threat to civilization and its discontents – as Ishmael Reed said, it belongs under some ancient Demonic Theory of Disease. Right now we can see Jes’ Grew starting to spread again, infecting millions with its laughter and its anger and its passion and its movement. Swaying its hips and marching down the middle of the street. The mass movement is moving and Jes’ Grew is its feverish disease, its Nkulu Kulu of the Zulu, a locomotive with red green and black python entwined in its face, Johnny Canoeing up the tracks.

Dispatches Jes’ Grew in a crucible of talk and mind and laughter and anger where all good things grow. Boom. Then there it was, dancing. Kent saw that and took it up several notches. We started off slow and picked up steam one day at a time and Jes’ Grew.

KJ: Though Mike and I are quite aware that posting on the Dispatches site has been considerably slowed the past number of weeks… We’ve been pretty overwhelmed by the work on the Resist Much/Obey Little anthology, soon to be released by Dispatches Editions. 350+ poets and 740 pages. (Actually, Tennessee Reed, Ishmael’s daughter, is in it, so there’s that chance growth to Mike’s reference, I suppose.) But we’ll get back to our usual cranky senior-citizen selves. Dispatches from the Poetry Wars will keep advancing by projective force of institutional critique, one unsuspected accretion leading instanter onto another, as someone else more or less once memorably put it… Of course, most of what we do is totally by the seat of our pants, as you might imagine. Dancing sitting down, etc. It is how we’ve done it, how we like it, and how we’ll keep rolling.

And strange that we’ve been doing it only for nine months, that it’s developed this much and attracted such a readership in this initial gestation, our audience consistently growing. One gratifying thing has been getting lots of communications from folks (some of them not eager to publicly share the confidences!), from poets of different aesthetic backgrounds and generations, telling us how much they dig Dispatches’ outlier charge, its willingness to be impolite in this deeply cautious poetic field, where people walk around on quiet toes most of the time, afraid for their “careers.” In any case, it’s become evident many readers appreciate that we confront and satirize and critique, with no special allowances for anyone, ourselves not excepted. Or is that “ourselves included,” I grew up in Uruguay with Spanish double negatives and I get confused. On the other hand, it’s been gratifying, and confirming, too, to not get any communication from some folks or institutions! Like the Poetry Foundation, which we’ve gone after a tad, it’s true, and which has clearly determined to pretend we don’t exist. Gratifying, I mean, in the sense of being a bit entertaining, really. Well, “Onward, Subcultural soldiers,” as the old-time hymn goes!

DD: In your first dispatch, you write: “Poetry is and always will be an unruly opening of profound modes of oppositional thought, a constant reset of “knowledge” and its categories, a site of revelation for unprecedented form and exorbitant meaning.” How do you see these “modes of oppositional thought” operating in this era of “alternative facts” and what you’ve called a “reality TV ontology”?

MB: Modes of oppositional thought operate within, and in fact are part of the crucial in-formation of, temporary autonomous zones that proliferate a-centrally to greater or lesser degrees in relation to the Given. They are openings, the play of emergence where you pick up news of that elsewhere that is here, always here and in this moment that Octavio Paz named otherness. Alternative facts and Reality TV ontology are conditions that only signify within the discourses determined by modernity. And as Charles Olson tried to tell people, we are already way past that.

No wonder the categories are breaking down. No wonder truth is evaporating in the desperate struggle to adjust to our groundlessness. It’s modernity’s truth without meaning, truth as an accurate measure of only the material extension of the cosmos, truth as fact whose techne creates the massive commodification machine that feeds the endless markets that arise to create sites where brief, fleeting experiences that resemble what used to be called meaning occur at endless points of purchase. What a deal. And even poetry, which I used to consider the anti-commodity, the death of commodification, has been turned into a token to advance careers, establish hoards of cultural capital, and found academic empires.

Temporary autonomous zones celebrate groundlessness as opportunity for the imagination to go on a tear. They don’t require bourgeois truth because modes of oppositional thought are creative, not reactive. We are the inheritors of the inevitable disintegration of a 500-year-old system riddled with violent, irresolvable contradictions that are coming to head. Temporary autonomous zones are forays into what John Clarke called “world completion,” looking out, not back, seizing the opportunity to articulate new groundings that refuse to become grounded.

KJ: That is a wonderful passage in our first, opening Dispatch, isn’t it? A kind of encapsulated Poetics. I wish I’d written it. But Mike usually comes up with the best lines. Not that I don’t get lucky and trip across a few myself. Which Mike then revises for me. No just kidding. The two of us actually have a fully fraternal and non-competitive collaboration. Quite amazing, really, that we’ve gone on this long, at this level of intensity, with no major blowups. Not exactly the most common thing in poetry circles.

I have just one comment here, about Mike’s use of the term “alternative fact.” It’s not really a disagreement with what Mike says, so much as an expansion of the term into other criteria: Poetry is its own alternative fact, the constructive ethical flip side to the manipulative “alternative facts” of ideological dissimulation and propaganda. To poach from Picasso (or was that Pessoa?) we aim to lie our asses off in name of the truth. And to poach from Eileen Myles’s cool blurb on the back of the Resist Much/Obey Little anthology, we will drown their banal, manipulative lies with the clear water of our truth-telling ones. (Mike, don’t blow up on me for first time for disagreeing with you here!)

DD: Kent, you and Michael have spent your artistic lives challenging orthodoxies and status quos inside and outside the poetry world. How, if at all, has this mission changed post-election?

KJ: Yes, I suppose that is true, how we’ve spent our artistic lives. It’s one reason we are outsider pariahs with overdue AARP cards. Not to mention that it’s why we never get invited to any poetry soirees on either of the three coasts (I’m including the Great Lakes, there, where I live). Or in the Dakotas or Saskatchewan, for that matter. So: Know what you are getting into, thou hordes of young poets at the AWP, now yearning to emulate our gadfly proclivities…

Seriously, I know what you’re getting at, Dante: That in the introduction to the anthology, Mike and I forcefully call for a united front of poets, across the tendencies and factions. And this is something the big book represents and enacts, to be sure, as its contents reflect all manner of “aesthetic” allegiances, from the colloquial and prosaic to the experimental and paratactic. Calling for such a united front would seem to provisionally put “poetry war” critique on hold, right? So, you ask a good question.

But I don’t think the matter has “changed post-election,” really, at least not in that manner. I myself go way back with this united-front position, and far back beyond my days as a publishing poet, in fact, to the mid-1970s, when I first become active in socialist politics. Extending those learned principles, I wrote an essay that was pretty widely circulated at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, titled “Bernstein’s ‘Enough!’” wherein I called for provisional poetic unity via the temporary collective vehicle of the Poets against the War project, and somewhat acidly berated the infantile sectarianism shown at the time by Language Poetry figures like Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman. More recently, I published an essay in Lana Turner, titled “No Avant-Garde,” where I called for the thinking-through of a broad cultural front, wherein writers and artists would deprioritizetheir aesthetic differences (but without giving them up!) vis-a-vis the tasks of principled unity around issues of progressive cause and action. Not that there aren’t others out there who might disagree with my views, and I am eager to invite them into exchange, if so! But poets, especially “Left” ones, generally don’t seem to like to debate too much in public, alas.

Of course, there is nothing new about such proposals. Such principled united-front strategy is at the heart of Left history and policy—it’s even the core assumption of the internal operations of bolshevist parties, before the Stalinist era! Not to mention social-democratic ones. What I’m saying is not that aesthetic differences be ignored or that critique be suspended. To the contrary, such critique must continue and be understood as part of the very process of cultural solidarity construction. What must happen, though, is that poets rise above their narrow poetic allegiances and predispositions of coterie to see that these don’t have to trump (sorry) the greater responsibility of collaboration and solidarity in the current conjuncture. Because that, most unfortunately for poetry’s politics, in and out, is what has happened: though there are some crossovers, poets of different aesthetics largely don’t talk to each other. Poets of the Geraldine Dodge Festival mainstream pretty much ignore and dismiss poets of the Avant wing of things. Avant poets think they’re so far ahead of slam poets in NYC or Chicago that they don’t need to pay them heed, for the slam folks are clueless about their more sophisticated vanguard understandings, and so forth. This is all sophomoric, cliquish bullshit and has to cease. There are many avenues and ways of collaboration between the poetic “tendencies” that haven’t even begun to be explored, and it will be in that comradeship, volatile to be sure, that the richest and most productive aesthetic debates will evolve. And may those debates be honest and fierce, as they should be. But the first step is to give up on this crap of “screw your poetry, ours is more of the common language and working class,” or “ours is more advanced, this is the analytic form we need, not your sorry workshop stuff” etc. We need to bring it all together, now, I would say, and see what happens. No one is above anyone else because no one really knows what the answer is. You know what I mean?

MB: Nothing has changed. Nothing. It is the same terrorist state that has operated in the US since Winthrop and the General Court expelled Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Sometimes it dresses up better, and sometimes it likes people to think it is “nice.” But it goes on shooting unarmed black men like Charles Kinsey, lying on his back with his hands in the air yelling “Don’t shoot.” (We have a precise found poem about this at Dispatches.) It goes on dragging Sandra Bland out of her car and lynching her in her cell for being an uppity black woman. Bang. The Poetry Wars are important and ongoing, even as we join multiple antagonists from that war to resist the current regime, because poetry is the only news worth knowing, and without waging a struggle for that, the careerists will succeed in locking it all up in the Great Philadelphia Poetry Detention Center (aka Great Philadelphia Poetry Warehouse and Media Center), where it will be alphabetized, categorized, and filed away for easy consumption in podcasts and use in marketing programs to increase the cultural capital of the Poetry Capitalists. Fuck that.

DD: You and Michael have written an amazing introduction to the anthology Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, in which you discuss the origin and intent of the project. Could you restate for our readers how this anthology came about and how it seeks to inaugurate a resistance to the Trump administration and its policies?

KJ: Thank you for saying that about the essay, Dante. Mike wrote to me on the day after the election, no doubt hungover, like I was, and he said, “Maybe it’s time for an anthology.” Because my head was stuffed with gauze alcohol swabs and I wasn’t thinking straight, I immediately wrote back to him, “OK, sure, let’s do it!” Then I can’t remember exactly what happened, it’s sort of a blur. Mike yelled at me a few times and I yelled at him, then we made up, or maybe we did not; we sometimes like doing yelling at each other.

Our masterstroke was pulling in a team of twenty incredible and dedicated poet-editors, who then went to the wall to bring people to the book. You can see their names on the cover. We totally decentralized the book’s production, out of emergency necessity, and (excepting the many unsolicited submissions we received to the Dispatches site, which Mike and I handled) the many editors had full autonomy over their solicitations and selections. Full mutual trust, risky but necessary. Then we gathered all this stuff, after thousands of emails back and forth between everyone, and went through a million more logistical nightmarish details, and Mike heroically handled all the formatting and technical labors, because I don’t even know how to create a PDF, and we put it all together, handling a second and fourth round of nightmarish logistical details, and then we wrote the intro and sent it all off for final design to the talented Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, one of our co-editors, and here we are, after being at 770 pages, and then having to edit the formatting down to 740 at the last second, because the spine couldn’t handle the thickness otherwise. This all happened in less than ten weeks. Right now, as we write, Valentine’s Day, the pornographic complicity (in more ways than one) of the Trump clique with the Russian mafia is coming clearer and clearer. Love to you, from tens of thousands of poets in the world, neo-Fascist johns.

MB: It Jes’ Grew.

DD: Despite the dire political situation confronting the United States at this moment, your introduction strikes a hopeful note for “collective measures of performance and action that move beyond the printed page.” Could you talk about “the new dimensions of activist vision” that may energize poetry in the coming years?

MB: Poetry is resistance by its very nature. It exposes the structures of containment that bind us mentally and spiritually, and materializes acts of freedom that break through that containment. Some people, like William Blake, realized that and made their writing into an ongoing revelation of our condition, a weapon for liberation, an act of resistance that still propels us further, beyond those mental chains. Others just get an MFA or an advanced degree in Poetics and carry on with their poetry careers. With the rise of a mass movement, and I do think that is what we are seeing in relation to the naked aggression of Trump’s regime against decency, compassion, care, even the idea of “democracy” itself, (poetry) business as usual is over. Poetry that brings the news will become more and more a part of people’s daily lives.

KJ: What Mike says. And we should be especially keen right now to the experiences of poetic/cultural activist movements in other places and times, study them for lessons we might apply: experiences where poets have reimagined the very meaning of “poetry” and thus given it unsuspected powers of influence and inspiration within the broader dialectic of struggle. We mention a few of them in the introduction, like the example of the CADA group and its allies during the Pinochet period, in Chile. American poets should look at the cultural guerrilla tactics of vanguard groups like CADA and others and seek to apply them to current Trumpian conditions. The stage of ideological, transgressive struggle has been set by the neo-fascist theater producers themselves. It’s time to occupy that stage with epic cultural actions and anti-actions, moving the meaning of radical performance into four and more dimensions, trashing all the B-movie scripts they had dreamt of directing.

DD: Reading through the manuscript of the anthology, Pierre Joris’s piece, “A little contribution to a how-to of resistance” caught my eye. The piece ends:

Vision-in-resistance/ resistance-in-vision as essential modes of action. (Revolution we’ve learned goes in circles, eats its own, creates bureaucra- cies.) Bertolt Brecht said: What times are these when / To talk about trees is nearly a crime, / Because it avoids speaking of all that’s evil! Paul Celan answered: What times are these / when A conversation / is nearly a crime, / because it includes so much / that’s already been said. I add: What times are these when a US President can define “real freedom” as the ability “for a person or nation to make a living, to sell or buy.”

It seems to me that the dialogue enacted in these lines is emblematic of the anthology’s project as a whole. Could you riff off of Joris (and Celan, and Brecht) and discuss this dialogue?

MB: Well, the key is Pierre’s opening equation: vision-in-resistance / resistance-in-vision. We need to keep in mind that the struggle we are engaged in is not simply “political” in so far as that is defined as a negotiation/struggle for power in a civic arena. The power at stake is the power to define a world as we emerge from the wreckage of the last Sampo. Poetry is uniquely placed to respond to that necessity because of its freedom in language, its creative potential, its necessary but indeterminate meaning which is entangled with vision. Not all poetry does that. A lot of it is all about buying in. Pierre’s injunction is to keep the vision active and non-central because without that, the same old tyrannies, tyrannies of meaning and power which are like wave and particle in quantum mechanics, will be reborn with new names. What times are these is a really good question to keep in mind not as some kind of closure, but as an opening between or beyond the particular horrors of our moment.

KJ: If I could offer this thought, triggered by your reference to Brecht: One genre-avenue for poets in the coming period that could be more explored, at least in regards to insurgent poetic engagement, is Poet’s Theater. What unsuspected estrangement-effects might happen when poetry and theater interface? More theater by poets! Not the largely nihilistic, hollow kind that we have had since the late-Language poetry phase up through Flarf, but a vibrantly radical and committed new form of poetic staging, one that learns (albeit with critique!) from Brecht, Erwin Piscator, John Arden, and Margaretta D'Arcy, say. Not that I’m all that in-the-know about theater; I’m certainly not. But there’s a space of action for poets here, no question.

DD: Resist Much / Obey Little has eighteen editors. I was wondering if a few of the editors could give me a comment on their involvement in this project and the importance of this anthology right now.

Nita Noveno: This anthology is urgent literature for our democracy. Working on the editorial team with Mike, Kent, and the others for the past few months (all online) was a pleasure. They were responsive, flexible, and encouraging in what was a challenging process. I especially appreciated their openness and energy in the endeavor. It was all worth it for a formidable and inspiring book.

Philip Metres: I was happy to be a contributing editor, to solicit poems from other poets, as part of a wider chorus of resistance to the election of Donald Trump. The naysayers will say that this is not enough. Of course it isn't enough. Poems themselves can never replace the prose of political engagement (voting, calling and writing congress people, canvassing, writing letters to the editor, protesting, boycotting, divesting, and the rest) but poetry can be part of our vocal commitment to democratic life, to the quest for human liberation, social justice, and planetary health. In the end, I'm less interested in the rhetoric of resistance than I am in the possibilities of the revisionary imagination to create the beloved community.

Kass Fleisher: I wasn’t part of the Outrage Action (I call it) after the election—I had been working the election in three states—not the presidential, but for three senate races, in PA, IL, and CO. But when you’re phonebanking, you hear some weird shit (people say the damnedest things into their telephones…) so I knew this was going to go down hard. I was also working citizen journalism on Facebook and getting killed by the right *and* the left. And I’ve been a feminist activist since 1982 and had been telling anyone who would listen to me, No way does this country elect a woman in a landslide. (Usually I spared people the lecture on nativism.) So when people started shrieking from any platform they could find on November 9, I was not among them. I had predicted 3 recounts, and I was bummed that we weren’t getting the recounts I wanted. lol. (Just so you know how dumb I am: I predicted them in PA, NC, and someplace I now forget—I can check my records but I doubt anyone gives a damn. I had been saying, “Pennsylvania is the new Florida.” But NC was a shock to me. Did not see that coming. In my defense, neither did James Carville. (Ha.)

One of my bubbles is the poetry bubble, and the thing folks in that universe were shrieking in The Great Aftermath (:>) was, We have to make poetry, we have to make poems, we poets have to work through poetry, let’s make some poems, who can publish some poems. To be honest, my first thought was, Stop voting for the Green Party when you’re running against an idiot; and my second thought was, What can poetry achieve in this situation.

It wasn’t a question because, really, I thought—nothing.

But I’ll tell you what, and I speak now as an anthologist and a micro-press publisher, I really liked what Kent and Mike came up with. (And other people may have been involved; it was Kent who approached me.) It wasn’t a howl in the wilderness—they got very well organized very fast. I’m in awe of how fast, and I love the model of finding X number of editors and giving us the freedom to solicit and edit people/works of our choosing. That was genius, and they also cared nothing for aesthetic schools or “what kind of poetry”—we were told “relevant.”

Immediately I began to think of this as an avalanche of anti-inaugural poems. It was clear that the recently revived Inaugural Poet thing was not going to happen, and if poetry can achieve something in our current situation, it would have to be in an avalanche.

And that’s what we have here—a fucking avalanche of anti-inaugural poems. I loved getting to work with the people who answered my own call, and I loved working on their pieces, which were all over the place in terms of structure and topic and form—and so what I see now that the damn thing is together, is that this avalanche of poems has a function. I’m scheduling a launch for it in my remote area for a couple of reasons: one is that folks of all bubbles still need a place to gather and process and plan to activate in this environment; and because the avalanche is so impressive that they will gain an appreciation for poetry of wildly varying “types.”

The way this thing was put together was *perfect*; the outcome is reflective of that initial blast of organization. I wish I’d been in the room for that—I probably would’ve said, You people should’ve worked a polling place. I’m that kind of asshole, lol. Folks in this particular bubble, and I’m one of them—we tend to be quite isolated—we work alone—we don’t always get out much—my own writing pals are scattered to the winds—so, it’s great that they found this way to bring us together, and with this magnificent result.

Can’t say enough about what they achieved here. I’m grateful.

Andrew Levy:Resist Much / Obey Little is BIG, with the voices of 350 contributors. When Kent and Mike asked for my participation as a contributing editor on the anthology, I didn’t hesitate. We could have easily, with a little more time (and money), attracted 3500 poets with valuable things to say at this moment in our country’s history. I’m teaching a literature course at CUNY this spring. The following statement from Martin Luther King, Jr. is the epigraph to the course syllabus: “This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed non-conformists…The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority… Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” (From Strength to Love)

Mindful of partisans such as Steve Bannon encouraging empire and its requisite illusions of apocalypse, whose armies of ruin offer paratory glances of an abandoned tomorrow, on the planet Earth the creatively maladjusted poets in Resist Much / Obey Little speak truth to power, thereby holding warring factions of American unreason accountable. How do mechanisms of social abandonment, in the imaginary hatred of the undevelopable, in a loss of sympathy for and understanding of the human and non-human, accompanied by the rise of nationalism, collide in silence with stultified invention, as, for example, in Trump’s nominations of Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, his immigration ban, and further deplorable executive orders. Resist Much / Obey Little challenges that drift into a common “normalizing” chord that so much of America’s collective unconscious and corporate media is rife with. That’s a significant accomplishment.

MB: It collects Kent’s work since 2008. As with most of Kent’s writing, it is sui generis. I mean, it is all part of the tradition of satire, satirical resistance animates his work, but each address finds its own particular form, the necessary form. From Middle English rhyme to mini-biographies to prize lists to bumper sticker verse, Kent is always inventing what is necessary to the articulation. It is often hilarious, but always deadly serious. I’m poaching myself from my intro to the book, I admit.

KJ: If I may, and it’s the only thing I will say about the book, and this is entirely Mike’s doing (he is a master of book layout and design): It arguably has the most exciting cover image of any North American poetry book in the last decade. I got lucky.

MB: John Clarke is a sadly under-recognized writer, partly because of his relation to Charles Olson, but largely because he was a deeply democratic person, someone who was committed to his work with no sense of ambition beyond the community of its interest. But I think it was Al Cook who said that Jack went as far beyond Olson as Olson went beyond Pound. The book is a collection of various pieces by Jack. The center of it is a book within a book edited by his friend and colleague, Al Glover, called toward a #6. It is a collection of letters, poems, and bibliography which gives you a strong sense of the complexity, immense range, and dynamic of Jack’s thinking. In addition, there is a long piece called “Lots of Doom” that is a transcription of a “reading” from 1971, three essays he wrote on Charles Olson, and some odds and ends. Lisa Jarnot wrote a terrific introduction and Daniel Zimmerman wraps it up with a profound meditation called “Knowing Jack.” Lisa’s book is a mystery. You could say we commissioned it. So you know it will be perceptive, insightful, and with a sharp edge.

KJ: We also have others in the tentative works: A book of strange and moving serial manifestos by the mysterious OBU group, a book by Laynie Browne, a translation by Chris Daniels of the astonishing and almost hereabouts-unknown Brazilian poet Orides Fontela, a profound and hilarious book of aphorisms by John Bradley, a rich collection of Mike’s own essays, and numerous other surprises to be announced.

DD: I’d like to end our conversation with a poem from Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Would you select one and introduce it?

Mike and Kent: This is the poem, published in 1979, by the great and ridiculously neglected Umbra-group poet Lorenzo Thomas, which opens the book, as epigraph. It’s almost as if he were visited, back then, it seems to us, by some Nostradamus-like vision of January 20th, 2017. We suspect there wasn’t anything “mystical” involved, but there’s something here in the undercurrent, as they say, that seems compellingly channeled across the long present. Listen poets:

Inauguration

The land was there before us Was the land. Then things Began happening fast. Because The bombs us have always work Sometimes it makes me think God must be one of us. Because Us has saved the world. Us gave it A particular set of regulations Based on 1) undisputable acumen. 2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately Referred to here as “bull market” And (of course) other irrational factors Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps, Our man in Saigon Lima Tokyo etc etc

— Lorenzo Thomas

Michael Boughn's most recent book, City — A Poem from the End of the World, was published in 2016 by Spuyten Duyvil. Hermetic Divagations — After H.D. is forthcoming in March, 2017 from Swimmers Group in Toronto. Together with Victor Coleman, he edited Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book for University of California Press. He lives in Toronto.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

February 17, 2017

While today's publication of the book, all by itself, represents the most meaningful validation of my work begun ten years ago as a labor of love, and thus is a reward onto itself, I would of course like to appeal to you to purchase a copy, to recommend it to your friends and on Goodreads, and to like/join the Russian Absurd Facebook page to receive updates as the book goes forth into the world. I want to make it perfectly clear that I am painfully aware of the bitter irony inherent in the fact that, should you choose to support my own work in bringing Russian poetry into English, I stand to benefit from the work of an author written without even a shred of hope of publication in his own lifetime, a writer who had been literally starving to death for the final five years of his life, and who finally did so, during the Siege of Leningrad, in 1942. While I do take this awesome responsibility before the court of your judgment very seriously, I have every intention of pursuing my own work, with or without financial remuneration or even the prospect of the publication of another book; among my next book projects is a Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the most important Russian poet of the 20th Century, one who has been most consequential to me personally, and yet another poet repressed by the Soviet regime. With this in mind, this, my last post dedicated to this book, is on DANIIL KHARMS and the STATE.

∞

AN OBSTACLE

Pronin said, “You have very pretty stockings.”Irina Mazer said, “So you like my stockings?”Pronin said, “Oh, yes. Very much.” And he ran his hand down her leg.Irina said, “But what do you like about my stockings?”Pronin said, “They are very smooth.”Irina lifted her skirt and said, “Do you see how high they go?”Pronin said, “Oh, yes. Yes.”Irina said, “They end all the way up here. And there, I am nude.”“Oh,” said Pronin.“I have very thick legs,” said Irina. “And I’m very broad in the thighs.”“Show me,” said Pronin.“I can’t,” said Irina. “I’m not wearing any underwear.”Pronin knelt on his knees before her.Irina said, “Why did you get down to your knees?”Pronin kissed her leg just above the stocking and said, “Here’s why.”Irina said, “Why are you lifting my skirt? Didn’t I tell you that I’m not wearing any underwear?”But Pronin lifted her skirt anyway and said, “That’s alright.”“What do you mean by that, alright?” Irina said.At that moment someone knocked on the door of Irina’s room.Irina quickly righted her skirt. Pronin got up off the floor and went to stand by the window.“Who is it?” Irina asked at the door.“Open the door,” a voice commanded.Irina opened the door, and in walked a man wearing a black coat and high boots. Behind him were two soldiers, armed with rifles, and the apartment super. The soldiers guarded the door, and the man in the black coat approached Irina Mazer and said, “Your last name?”“Mazer,” Irina said.The man in the black coat addressed Pronin: “Your last name?”Pronin said, “Pronin. My last name is Pronin.”“Are you armed?” said the man in the black coat.“No,” Pronin said.“Sit here,” said the man in the black coat, pointing to a chair.Pronin sat down.“And you,” said the man in the black coat, addressing Irina, “put on your coat. You will have to take a ride with us.”“What for?” Irina asked.The man in the black coat didn’t reply.“I have to change,” Irina said.“No,” said the man in the black coat.“But I have to put on a little something,” said Irina.“No,” said the man in the black coat.Irina silently grabbed her fur jacket.“Good-bye,” she said to Pronin.“Conversation is forbidden,” said the man in the black coat.“Do I have to go with you also?” Pronin asked.“Yes,” said the man in the black coat. “Get your coat.”Pronin got up, grabbed his coat and hat off the hanger, put them on, and said, “Alright, I’m ready.”“Follow me,” said the man in the black coat.The soldiers and the apartment super clicked their heels.Everyone exited into the hallway.The man in the black coat locked the door to Irina’s room and sealed it with two brown seals.“Everybody out,” he said.And they all walked out of the house, slamming the apartment door shut.

August 12, 1940

MOB JUSTICE

Petrov saddles up his horse and declaims, directing himself at the crowd that’s gathered round, what would happen if in place of the public gardens they erect an American skyscraper. The crowd seems to agree. Petrov scribbles something into his notebook. From the throng emerges a man of medium height and he asks Petrov what it was he jotted down. Petrov answers that it concerns no one but himself. The man of medium height continues to pester him and, after words are exchanged, they come to blows. The crowd allies itself with the man of medium height and Petrov has to save his life by flogging his horse and disappearing around a corner. The crowd surges with anxiety and, having no one to sacrifice, grabs the man of medium height and cracks his head open. The decapitated head rolls down the bridge paving stones and becomes wedged in the sewer drain. The crowd, its lust for violence appeased, disperses.

[1940]

ON UNIVERSAL BALANCE

Everyone knows these days how dangerous it is to swallow stones.One of my acquaintances even coined an expression for it: “Waisty,” which stands for: “Warning: Stone Inside”. And a good thing too he did that. “Waisty” is easy to remember, and, as soon as it comes up, or you need it for something, you can immediately recall it.Аnd this friend of mine worked as a fireman, that is, as an engine stoker on a locomotive. First he rode the northern lines, then he served on the Moscow route. And his name was Nikolay Ivanovich Serpukhov, and he smoked his own hand-rolled cigarettes, Rocket brand, 35 kopeks a box, and he’d always say he doesn’t suffer from coughing as bad from them, and the five-ruble ones, he says, they make him gag.And so, it once happened that Nikolay Ivanovich found himself in Hotel Europe, in their restaurant. Nikolay Ivanovich sits at his table, and the table over from him is occupied by some foreigners, and they’re gobbling up apples.And that’s when Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself: “A curious thing,” Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself, “What an enigma the human being is.”And as soon as he had said this to himself, out of nowhere, before him appears a fairy and says:“What is it Good Sir that you desire?”Well, of course, there’s a commotion at the restaurant, like, where did this little damsel suddenly appear from? The foreigners had even stopped stuffing themselves with apples. Nikolai Ivanovich himself caught a good scare and he says, just for the sake of it, to get rid of her:“Please, forgive me,” he says, “But there is nothing in particular that I need.”“You don’t understand,” the mysterious damsel says, “I’m what you call a fairy,” she says. “In a single blink of an eye, I can make for you anything you wish. You just give me the word, and I’ll make it happen.”That’s when Nikolay Ivanovich notices that some sort of a citizen in a gray suit is attentively listening in on their conversation. The maître d’ comes running in through the open doors and behind him, some other character, with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.“What the heck!” Nikolay Ivanovich thinks to himself, “Who the hell knows how this thing will turn out.”And indeed, no one can understand what is going on. The maître d’ is hopping across the tops, from one table over to another, the foreigners are rolling up all the carpets, and in general, who the hell can tell what’s really going on! Who is capable of what, that is!Nikolay Ivanovich ran out into the street, forgetting even the hat he’d left behind earlier at the coat check, and he ran out onto LaSalle Street and said to himself: “Waisty! Warning: Stone Inside!” And also: “What haven’t I seen already in this whole wide world!”And, having returned home, Nikolay Ivanovich said this to his wife:“Do not be afraid, Ekaterina Petrovna, and do not worry. Only there isn’t any equilibrium in this life. And the mistake is only off by some kilogram and half for the entire universe, but still, it’s amazing, Ekaterina Petrovna, it is simply remarkable!”

Kharms, while a pacifist and eventually a "conscientious objector," was strictly apolitical. Before the Oberiu were suppressed, he had toyed around with the idea of positioning the group as a successor to Mayakovsky's Left artist movement (the New Left). In his late anecdotes (“Pronin,” “Mishin's Victory,” etc.,) Kharms comes uncomfortably close to describing the actual horror, to bearing witness, but for the most part, he makes due with parables, like the following, and it is precisely that compression and allusiveness that we love him for so much. (I think you will agree how prescient, timely, and still relevant the first of these just now happens to be).

Theme for a Story

A certain engineer sets before himself the task of building a huge brick wall across all of Petersburg. He ponders how this may bedone, and stays up all night mulling over it. Gradually, a circle of thinker-engineers forms and develops a plan for building the wall.It is decided to build the wall at night, and in such a way that it is all built in a single night, so that it appears as a surprise. The workers are called together. Assignments are handed out. The civic authorities are distracted, and finally the night arrives upon which the wall is to be built. Only four people are aware of the plan to build the wall. The construction workers and the engineers receive precise assignments, where it is they should stand and what they should do. Thanks to such exact planning, they succeed in building the wall in a single night. On the next day, Petersburg is all up in a topsy-turvy. And the inventor himself is feeling in the dumps. How this wall should be used didn’t occur to him either.

[1929–30]

The conclusion of “Let us look out of the window”

So I go to the food cooperative and say: Give me that can of sardines over there. And they tell me: We have no sardines, these cans are empty. And I tell them: Why are you pulling my leg? And they tell me: It’s not our idea. So whose idea is it? It’s due to the shortages, because the Kyrgyz have rustled away all the split-hoofed ungulates. So are there any vegetables? I ask them. No vegetables either. All bought up. Keep quiet, Grigoriev. And the human being finished with a song:

I, Grigoriev, just shut up,And began to carry binocs.I look through them and look,And see the stacks to come.

The End

[1930]

How strange it is, how inexpressibly strange, that behind this wall, behind this very wall, a man is sitting on the floor, stretching out his long legs in orange boots, an expression of malice on his face. We need only drill a hole in the wall and look through it and immediately we would see this mean-spirited man sitting there. But we shouldn’t think about him. What is he anyway? Is he not after all a portion of death in life, materialized out of our own conception of emptiness? Whoever he may be, God bless him.

June 22, 1931

An Inoculation

A gentleman slight in height with a pebble in his eye approached the door of a tobacco shop and stopped. His polished black shoes shone by the stone steps leading up into the tobacco shop. The tips of the shoes were pointing inside the shop. Two more steps and the gentleman would have disappeared behind its door. But for some reason he tarried, as if intentionally, to place his head under the brick that had just fallen off the roof. The gentleman even removed his hat, as if only now discovering his bald skull, so that the brick hit the gentleman squarely on his naked head, breaking his skull bone and getting stuck in his brain....

...Don’t you worry, gentlemen, I’ve already had an inoculation. You see, the pebble sticking out of my right eye? This had happened to me once already. I’ve gotten used to it by now. It’s all a piece of cake now.

And with these words the gentleman put on his hat and went off somewhere, exiting stage right, leaving the confused crowd in complete befuddlement.

[1939-1940]

∞

Seated at a table, flighty thoughts,shoulders spread, inflated chest,I pronounced empty speeches,still as a statue and just as loved.

[1930– 33?]

From “To Oleinikov”

Wait! Turn back! Where, with your cold and calculatedThought, are you fleeing, forgetting the law of the crowd?Whose chest was pierced by arrow so morose? Who’sEnemy to you, who friend? And where’s your gravestone?

January 23, 1935

This is how hunger begins:you wake early and full of lifebut soon begin to weaken;the onset of boredom arrives,the sense of loss impendingof quickening powers of mind,followed by a peace descending.And then, the terrifying ending.

[1937]

You will be murdered by your dreams.Your interest in this life of struggle willdisperse like the mist. Simultaneously,the heavenly messenger’s wings will miss.Your wants and desires will wither and wiltand the inflamed ideas of your youth scatter.Let them go! Leave them behind, my friend,your dreams, so your mind is free for the end.

October 4, 1937

The end is here, my strength expires.The grave is calling me to my rest.And suddenly life’s trace is lost.Quieter and quieter beats the heart.Death races toward me like a cloudAnd in the sky the sun’s light goes out.I see death. It’s forbidden for me to live.Good-bye, dear earth! Earth, farewell!

[1937]

We have been killed in the field of life.Not even a shred of hope remaining.Our dreams of happiness are over—The only thing left for us is penury.

[1937]

They shoved me under the table,But I was very weak and a fool.The freezing wind blew throughThe cracks and landed on my tooth.

It was torturous for me to lie so,But I was very weak and a fool.The atmosphere is too coolFor comfort at any time of the year.

I would have lain on the floor in silence,Flung open my coat of sheepskin wool,But it became insanely dull to lie so,For I am very weak and a fool.

April 23, 1938

I thought of eagles for a long timeand understood such a whole lot:the eagles soar above the clouds,they fly and fly and touch no one.They live on cliffs and on mountainsand are intimate with water sprites.I thought a long time about eaglesbut confused them, I think, with flies.

March 15, 1939

∞

From the Diaries (1937– 1938)

June 1, 1937. 2 hours 40 minutes.

An even more terrifying time has arrived for me. At the Children’s Literature publishing house, they are up in arms about one of mypoems and have begun to bait and persecute me. They have stopped publishing me, explaining it away with “We can’t pay you because of some clerical error.” My sense is that something mysterious and evil is taking place behind the scenes. We have nothing to eat. We go unbearably hungry.

I know the end has come. I am now going off to visit ChildLit to receive a refusal of my request for payment.

November 16, 1937

I no longer wish to live. I have no need of anything: not a shred of hope left. I have not a prayer for the Lord, let His will be done, whatever He intends for me, be it death or be it life— whatever He intends. Into thine hands, oh, Lord, Jesus Christ, I commit my spirit. Keep me from harm, have mercy on me, and grant me eternal life.Amen.Daniil Kharms——I don’t have the strength to do anything. I don’t want to live.

January 12, 1938

I am amazed by human perseverance. It is already January 12, 1938. Our situation has become even more desperate, but we’re still scraping by. Dear Lord, please send us a prompt and easy death.——How low I have fallen; few have fallen this low. One thing is certain: as low as I’ve fallen, there is no getting up.

All people love money. They pat it and kiss it and press it to their hearts and wrap it in pretty strips of cloth and cradle and rock it as though it were a doll. Some take a dollar sign and confine it to a frame, hang it on their wall, and worship it as though it were an icon or an idol. Some feed their money: they open its mouth and stuff it with the most succulent, fat morsels of their own food. In summer heat they put their money in the cold storage of a root cellar and in winter, in the bittermost frost, they throw the money in the wood stove, into the flames. Others simply hold a conversation with their money, or read to it aloud from interesting books, or sing to it pleasant songs. I personally give money no particular attention and simply carry it around in my wallet or in a billfold and, as need arises, spend it. Yowza!

"If a state could be likened to the human organism then, in case of war, I would like to live in its heel." — Daniil Kharms, 1938

∞

And this one final appeal... As I had mentioned in my first post in this series, having edited the Spring 2015 Russia issue of the Atlanta Review, I have been slated to edit the magazine's Spring 2018 Baltic poetry issue, along with Kevin M. F. Platt and Rimas Uzgiris. Given that the sanctions against Russia, and even the future of NATO and the EU themselves, are currently in doubt, there is a great sense of urgency, and I have been given the green light by the journal's new editor, Karen Head, to edit a Special Summer 2017 issue, if we are able to raise $5,000 for it. This link to the Kickstarter campaign to raise that money will go live shortly.

"Lively and affectionate" Publisher's Weekly. Now in paperback.Click image to order your copy.

Register now for our 5th annual session Jan 27 - Feb 3. “What better place to read, write, and talk about the art and craft of writing than Todos Santos, where all the saints of the sea and sky watch over you?” - Christopher Merrill

Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours laterto the greatnessof Teddy Wilson"After You've Gone"on the pianoin the cornerof the bedroomas I enterin the dark